Flash was originally developed by an organization called FutureWave, which was acquired by Macromedia in 1996, who were in turn acquired by Adobe in 2005. It has been a premiere format for vector-based animation and graphics, but has struggled to compete in the online video space, especially with recent innovations in HTML5. Although it used to be solely Flash-based, YouTube now incorporates dynamic streaming to accommodate broad distribution over HTTP networks. If you’ve got a Flash playlist somewhere that you love and would like to keep, you should convert to MP3 soon before the Flash format becomes totally obsolete.