SkyFire for iPad Launching Tonight For $4.99 [Update: It's Live!]
It's been a busy couple of weeks for the folks over at SkyFire. They launched their Flash Video-friendly browser for the iPhone back in early November, only to pull it down almost immediately to ease the onslaught of users hammering their video transcoding server.
Context & Ripple Effects
SkyFire's iPad arrival extends a fast-moving arc: Apple approved its Flash-video-to-HTML5 converting browser for iOS in early November 2010, and it then pulled in nearly $1 million in its first App Store weekend — so much traffic that SkyFire had to yank the app almost immediately to relieve its transcoding servers. A 3.0 release for Android followed in late November, making tonight's $4.99 iPad launch the third platform in roughly seven weeks.
First-order effects
- SkyFire adds a second paid iOS SKU at $4.99, directly extending the revenue stream that produced nearly $1 million in its first iPhone weekend.
- The launch re-exposes SkyFire's core operational constraint from November: every iPad sale adds video traffic that its transcoding servers must absorb, and the earlier pull-from-sale shows what happens when they can't.
Second-order effects
- Rival mobile browsers face pressure to match SkyFire's cross-platform cadence — iPhone, Android, and now iPad within two months sets a pace that browser makers without a server-side video pipeline must respond to with features of their own.
- App Store pricing dynamics get another data point: a utility browser sustaining a $4.99 paid price against free alternatives validates premium one-time purchases for functionality Apple itself doesn't ship.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, server-side transcoding browsers position themselves as a bridge business whose value is explicitly tied to Flash video's remaining lifespan on mobile — the more the ecosystem shifts natively to HTML5, the less the middleman is worth.
- Apple's willingness to approve a workaround for its own no-Flash policy establishes a template where third-party software, rather than Apple, absorbs the compatibility gap — a structure other excluded technologies may seek to replicate through the same proxy approach.
The trend: Mobile browsing is splitting into native HTML5 experiences and paid proxy-browser workarounds that rent users access to the Flash web Apple refuses to support.