A new startup has unveiled a service that will convert Flash videos to an iPhone ready format. The company is called Episodic.com, and their service works like this:
Users submit an RSS feed of their content to Episodic, which will then scan the feed for video content and convert the videos to an iPhone-friendly format. Episodic provides users with a static URL that iPhone surfers can use to dial up the video content.
The drawback is that the site can only generate iPhone-ready videos from feeds generated by certain video-sharing sites, including YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, MySpace TV, DailyMotion and Metacafe.
As of now, those six sites present adult webmasters with varying degrees of adult-friendliness. YouTube and MySpace both prohibit adult content, but Vimeo, Blip.tv, DailyMotion and Metacafe all allow adult content. DailyMotion and Metacafe rank as the friendliest to adult among these six, with entire sections on their sites dedicated to adult content.
On top of the limited selection of sites, another drawback of Episodic's service is the need for RSS feeds.
"There’s currently no way to take a standard URL and convert that page’s content to video - you need to generate a playlist using an RSS feed," said tech blogger Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch.com.
Video producers also have to ultimately host their content outside their own site, but Episodic does offer a customizable player that can include any logo or branding needed.
Apple's iPhone still doesn't support Adobe's Flash player, one of the key content delivery platforms online. Steve Jobs said that "proper" Flash "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone.
After some high-profile wrangling, Adobe backed away from a promise to deliver Flash to the iPhone.