I’ve been messing around with uploading video this week and it’s kind of a pain. For one thing, the file sizes seem huge, on the order of 50-150 megs. I’ve got decently fast broadband, but uploading still takes a bit of time (20-40 minutes) and I do a lot of things in my browser because I’m a hard-core multitasker. So I’m dealing with big file sizes and trying to upload them inside a browser window. It’s been a bad combination. My file will stop transferring, the browser has crashed a couple of times. It’s just a bad experience.

AIR is a great solution here. This isn’t just taking a web application offline, it’s helping the user. Having direct access to the filesystem makes the upload experience much, much better. For one thing, you aren’t dependent on the browser. Why wait 40 minutes to upload your file when you could be browsing around being (un)productive? Download crashes? Why not have an application that knows exactly how many bytes were uploaded so it can pick up where it left off? With AIR you can do all of this using web technologies so you don’t have to have any knowledge for building desktop applications. You can pretty quickly create an AIR app that ties back to your server, with code you’ve already written, tools you’re already using, and assets you’ve already got. Plus, it’s all cross platform.

As more and more people start doing higher and higher quality video, we need to get a better upload experience.

[tags]Video, Adobe AIR, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]