Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen likes to crow about the ubiquity of Flash, his company's media-player technology that's installed on nearly every Internet-connected computer. But how did Flash become the standard for Web video when Apple, Microsoft, and RealNetworks were all jousting for that market?

Digital Web Magazine takes a detailed look at Flash's rise. It all began, writes Digital Web, when a Flash developer discovered a way to embed video in Flash as a series of images. It was a crude technique, but it compressed the video file down to a manageable download. Then Macromedia - later purchased by Adobe - improved Flash's video editing and playback features, and Web developers ran with it.

Flash's secret was that it played video right from within a page, without requiring pop-up windows or standalone players. That's a trick that Microsoft and Real never mastered. And that's why YouTube, and later MySpace, embraced Flash: Videos started playing back rapidly, without the need for any software downloads, and didn't take users away from the Web page they were surfing at the moment. YouTube and MySpace's use of Flash ensure its continued ubiquity; as Chizen told Business 2.0, MySpace's adoption of a new version of Flash technology on its website is making that latest version's adoption happen at the fastest rate ever. That virtuous circle is going hard for competitors to break.