Yesterday evening was one of the rare instances when my Comcast Cable subscription service had an outage. And I was missing my routine fix of one my favorite TV programs “American Greed” by CNBC. This episode was on an organization that cooked their books in the 90s to post record growth for many years.
Needless to say, I was unhappy. I had to watch it! It then dawned on me that I could use my spanking new Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone equipped with the latest and greatest, pure google, Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, untarnished by any bloat ware from the mobile service provider.
I could go directly to the CNBC website and start streaming the episode. Its right there! It should be a breeze right? Wrong! The streaming website uses flash and the browser I was using (chrome beta) needed flash. So I go to the google play store to download the flash app and try again. Still nothing! I tried rebooting my phone. Nothing. I tried using using another third party browser. Nope. After trashing around for about an hour, I had to console myself watching another streaming episode from Netflix app (which works great by the way). By this time the Comcast outage was over anyway but I missed my program. Sad.
This morning, I found new vigor to get to the bottom of the problem. And I cracked it. The flash plugin will only work with the default android browser. Go figure. It did not occur to me that I should use the default browser.
So there you go folks. Lesson learnt. But lets not get too comfortable. Support for Flash may not last for long on Android as rumors indicates that the next version of Android will have Chrome as its default browser. This could very likely mean no support for Flash. With so much streaming content on the web still based on Flash, I am guessing that I am primed for more disappointment.
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