Check out what the Open Source Flash community is up to and you'll probably get wide-eyed when you take a look at the Red5 project. These guys have been busy decoding the intricacies of the proprietary RTMP protocol used by the Flash Communication/Media Server.

From the looks of it, they already have a functional version of the software which can stream, record, and distribute media as well as provide shared object support for flash clients.

What does this all mean to Joe blogger? In my opinion, it's sort of the last piece of the puzzle for audio and video distribution for the little guy. Put together a cross platform video player client with a decent codec (Flash8 w/ On2 VP6 codec), a fat-pipe content distributor (archive.org or coral cache), and an easy method for authoring and recording live content (Red5 with a flash recorder client) and you suddenly have a framework for creating video and audio webcasts in real-time on a tight budget. Sexy!

Think blogs were a big thing?  Wait 'till authoring and publishing video takes as little time and money as typing up a few paragraphs.  Note to Google: time to get your transcoding algorithms ready for audio search.

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