SoundCloud: HTML5 Player For Embedded Audio

Until recently, the method most DAM systems used for delivering audio assets was a SWF player that  played a transcoded MP3 proxy file.  That’s probably going to be the case for at least the next year (or more) but SoundCloud are aiming to hasten the demise of Flash’s role as delivery medium of choice for audio files.  Their HTML5 audio player released recently has a few unique features such as time based commenting and, crucially, it work on Apple mobile devices like iPada, iPods and iPhones.  SoundCloud uses a widget based method to enable the player to be used inside web systems such as web based DAMs or websites:

“With the launch of SoundCloud for iPad last week, we released one of your most-requested products of this year. Today, we’re following up with your second-most requested feature: an HTML5 widget. And while we were at it, our front-end and design teams went back to the drawing board and turned the widgets into real social sound objects, giving your sounds even more context, putting them even more front and center.” [Read More]

As we have discussed before, HTML5 remains impractical for many enterprise DAM implementations because of the poor browser support for it compared with Flash, but undoubtedly that is gradually going to change as is the proliferation of incompatible standards.  With Adobe being increasingly not so keen on Flash themselves, HTML5 seems likely to become the delivery technology of choice for all web accessible media.

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