This is a follow-up to my January post Less than 90% adoption of .MP4-compatible Flash 9+10? The short story is that the mp4-compatible Flash installations number just over 90%, up from about 86% back in January.

This means that if you solely use .mp4 to present screencasts to the world, you’re missing out on 10% of your viewership because they won’t be able to view mp4 content (they can view .flv content just fine though).  The critical version number is 9.0.115 – if their Flash version is 9.0.115 or above then they can view .mp4 videos.

As before I’ve used three sites that I have control over – ShowMeDo with a large, international audience, my own blog and the main ProCasts site.

The monthly visitor counts are:

• ShowMeDo.com 100,000 (4 years+)
• IanOzsvald.com 1,800 (4 years+)
• ProCasts.co.uk 2,300 (1 year)

Counting the percentage of visitors who have Flash Player 9.0.115 or better we see:

• ShowMeDo.com 93% (it was 86% back in January)
• IanOzsvald.com 86% (it was 84% back in January)
• ProCasts.co.uk 93% (it was 96% back in January – but this was from a smaller data set that was more likely to show a big variance in monthly figures)

Across the three sites the average number of players that have version numbers definitely below 9.0.115 were 1.75%.  The number inbetween (approximately 7.5%) didn’t reliably report their version number – either these were not real Flash players or they may have been very old versions.

As I stated before – if you’re thinking of just using .mp4 videos to show your screencasts then you risk losing 10% of your potential viewership.  If all your viewers are on the Mac or iPhone then it might make sense to go with .mp4 but otherwise I’d suggest either staying with .flv (that’s what we do in ProCasts) or using a player than can support both file types.

The Just over 90% adoption of .MP4-compatible Flash 9+10! by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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