[firefoxman1]

The only thing that will keep Flash alive even once HTML5 is pretty much universally supported will be the content control Flash has. With the <video> or <audio> tag, all you have to do is view the page source and you can download anything. I think companies like Vevo will fight hard against that.

[dredmorbius]

Yeah, I mean, it's not like there are any Flash download tools now or anything.

Or even digging through various directories to find where your video's been downloaded to.

For a while there, Flash was insisting on deleting its files (the directory entry is removed but the handle and content remain) in Linux. You can still find the filehandle through /proc and restore it.

Content control doesn't work so long as users own their systems and you've got to distribute it in some means or another.

[jncraton]

I see your point and I agree that big companies will probably want an offering which provides some content control, but I don't think that flash (or anything else) does or can do a good job at this. It's hard to have open standards for DRM since most content protection relies heavily on security through obscurity.