[New York Times] Flash-Free Video in 2016

At the beginning of this year, we officially turned off Flash support for VHS, the New York Times video player. We now use HTML5 video technology for all video playback on desktop and mobile web browsers. Flash was a very powerful and popular technology in its day but it has waned over the years as browsers have embraced the open standard of HTML5. Throughout the second half of 2015, Chrome, Firefox and Safari also began blocking the Flash plugin from automatically loading content unless users gave their permission. In order to continue providing a quality video experience for our viewers, switching exclusively to HTML5 video became necessary.

Video has become a critical part of storytelling at The New York Times, and it has seen tremendous growth over the past few years. With this growth, as well as a new company-wide focus on video, we decided to build our own video player last year rather than continuing to use third-party solutions. There were many reasons for the move, but primarily we wanted to own the entire video experience in-house in order to focus on our needs and values. Performance, premium video quality and ability to customize the experience were our primary concerns. With video used in both articles and in unique, custom experiences, we have a diverse set of requirements. We wanted to give the newsroom a flexible, extensible player with a core foundation so they could focus on creating the experience. With this aim, we built a JavaScript wrapper around a video element that could either be an HTML5 video element or a Flash OSMF video object. For extensibility, we included a light, event-driven plugin system.

When we first developed the player, Flash was still the dominant technology for publishers.