Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash Player, has posted a blog entry that details the number of daily downloads and installs of Flash Player. As expected, the numbers are really, really big. "In July 2008, successful downloads averaged about 33 million per day, and successful installs averaged around 18 million per day."

The latest number from Microsoft (that they give publicly) for Silverlight downloads is from April of this year, when they were averaging 1.5 million per day.

Its probably worthwhile to look at the numbers for the Olympics recently and compare those to the number of installs for Silverlight. According to ZDNet, on day 3 of the opening weekend 3.42 million streams were watched online at NBC Olympics. Assuming that person viewed just two streams, that's about 1.7 million users - or about the number of installs that Microsoft could expect in 2 days (if they're completion rate is the same as Adobe's - about 54%, and assuming that every person watching didn't have the runtime installed.) And the same number that Adobe receives in 2 or 3 hours.

When it was first announced that NBC would be using Silverlight for the Olympics, many people thought this would be a great catalyst for distribution of the runtime. I had different thoughts at the time, and I think they've proven to be true.

Flash Player is an extremely popular plugin for web browsers, that's obvious. What I find amazing about it isn't that its on nearly every computer that connects to the Internet, but that it gets updated so quickly. Recent stats show that about 80% of users update to the latest version of the Flash Player within 6 months of release. Its that reason that Flash is such a compelling platform to develop on, and why Flex is really taking off.

How does that compare to other technologies? Well, a recent survey has found that 40% of people aren't using the latest version of their web browser. More at Google, and the official study paper. That's a lot of people - more than 600 million of them. Some are running the latest main version, but without the security updates, and others are running older versions of the browser. (For eg. 92.2% of Firefox users were using Firefox 2, though Firefox 3 is available.) Updated by Mike: I misread the Google blog post referenced above.

How does this affect you? Well, with Flash Player, you can be pretty sure that 80% of people will be using the latest version within 6 months of release. As a developer, that means you can use all the newest features right away, without having to wait for users to update. That's very different than if you're developing apps in the browser.

This is big news for video on the web. Today Adobe announced that we've added h.264 support to the Flash Player. There is a ton of information out there on the web this morning about this release (some good articles at Read Write Web, and Ryan Stewarts's ZDNet blog) . Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player team, has a great real world analysis about what this really means for video on the web.

What does this mean for the typical RIA developer? If you've been integrating audio and video into your application already, you can now use the h.264 codec as the format for that video. This is typically used in QuickTime video, and can output much higher quality video than you've had in the past. (Adobe will be supporting this video format in the upcoming Adobe Media Player, due out early next year.)

If you've been using QuickTime video in your RIA application, you no longer need to load an extra plugin for it. Flash Player will support that video natively. The team at Total Training was doing this - using QuickTime video inside their online training RIA. (I think they had all the video encoded in h.264 format already, and didn't want to convert it all to Flash video format.) This is going to allow them to create a unified experience for their online training application.

Some people are calling this a tipping point for Blue Ray and the h.264 HD format. (HD DVD uses a different format). That might be true. With ~ 90% penetration for Flash Player 9, in just 10 months since release, having Flash Player support the same HD format as BlueRay is huge.

For RIA developers though, this means just one thing - a better video experience inside your RIAs that are built with Flex or AIR. And that's good news for everyone.