Ladies and gentlemen, pornography has spoken: Adobe's Flash is dead.

Starting with Apple's iconic CEO Steve Jobs releasing a snarky open-letter addressing why Apple has elected not to support Flash on its mobile platforms, it seems to have been an increasingly downward spiral for Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash software.

While a far cry from being dead in practical terms, the announcement from a major porn house declaring that they are moving to HTML5 instead of Flash could be the harbinger of doom for Adobe.



AppleInsider reports:

Apple is finding an unlikely ally in its efforts to support HTML5 in preference to Adobe Flash as the platform for dynamic web content: pornographers.

According to a report by ConceivablyTech, leading adult film studio Digital Playground has announced its intentions to make the leap to HTML5, based in part upon needing to target HTML5 to reach Apple's iPhone users.

Digital Playground began offering its content to iPhone users two years ago. Because Apple has a policy of not carrying pornography in its own curated App Store, the only option available to to the studio was to use the iPhone's open, unrestricted web platform.

While it's hard to put into verifiable statistics (read: I don't want to look them up), there is certainly evidence out there that suggests that whenever there is a battle between two forms of media, the side that pornographers take is usually the one that wins. This can be seen as recently as the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD battle. When the same porn-house, Digital Playground, announced they were dropping support for HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray, it was largely regarded as the final nail in HD-DVD's coffin. And by the way, how's that HD-DVD player working out for ya? Yup. That's what I thought.

Going as far back as VHS vs. Laserdisc and then VHS vs. DVD, the winning media format has always been the one backed by porn.

As cliché as it sounds, sex sells. With web giants like YouTube already starting to support HTML5 instead of Flash, this latest development certainly doesn't bode well for Adobe. Good thing they make a little thing called Photoshop, otherwise they'd be in some serious trouble. Will Flash go the way of the dinosaurs known as VHS and Laserdisc? Only time will tell. But if it does, you heard it here first.

And hey, at least now we can all watch porn on our iPads! Wahoo!