• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, September 4, 2015

While companies scramble to adjust to the “Flash freeze” put out by Google and others this month, Frank Sinton, CEO at Beachfront Media, has seen demand for his company’s HTML 5-first video advertising player skyrocket.

In January 2014, Beachfront had 100 million requests for mobile video ads. One year later, in January 2015, that number had reached 10 billion. From January to now, that number has doubled to 20 billion.

“The ad tech industry is going through big changes right now, but this is the biggest,” says Sinton. “Beachfront’s been waiting for this moment for a while.” The first nail in the coffin for Flash was Apple’s 2010 announcement of the iPad, with no support for the Adobe product.

Android continued to support Flash for a little while longer, but soon dropped it as well.

Sinton wrote an article in 2010 showing how the ecosystem would change as Flash faded out. Several of the comments on that piece show how much thought, and the mobile advertising ecosystem, has changed in five years.

“Let me get this straight..." says one irate-seeming comment to Sinton's article. "Companies in the middle of the worst recession ever seen are going to suddenly re-engineer their Web sites to HTML5, and re-encode their videos from VP6 to h.264, strictly because the iPad can't play Flash? …don’t fall for the iHype."

The words are only inaccurate in hindsight. Back in 2010, HTML5 was very much in its infancy, without a finalized standard until October 2014. Additionally, mobile didn’t have anywhere near the penetration or market share then that it does today.

The problem, says Sinton, is that many companies didn’t adjust their thinking as mobile rose, HTML5 became standardized, and VPAID enabled a lot of the same capabilities as flash.

For those that didn’t foresee the shift, it’s going to be a cold fourth quarter. Sinton, on the other hand, appears to have a beachfront view.