runtime and application platform. During the development of Flash 5, Gay took a several month hiatus from day-to-day operations of the Flash team to think about new projects of strategic importance to the company. At that time, engineering VP Peter Santangeli took over leadership of the Flash team and would lead the team for Flash 5 and Flash MX. When Jon returned, he was armed with a vision for a new class of Web applications that enabled communication, collaboration and what he called "online storytelling." He saw the Flash Player's success and ubiquity as an opportunity for bringing the real-time communication technology that these applications would require to every computer running the Flash Player. He founded a new team alongside the Flash team to fulfill this vision, building a product which he code named "Tin Can," a reference to the tin can telephone made by children using two tin cans and a string. This new team and the Flash team worked together to incorporate two-way, real-time video and audio technology into the Flash Player, the first incarnation of which was released in March 2002 as part of Macromedia Flash Player 6. At the same time, the Tin Can team built a new server product, Flash Communication Server (now Flash Media Server), which communicated with the Flash Player over a new real-time protocol called RTMP. Tin Can could be used for use cases as simple as streaming a video over the Web, or as sophisticated as a videoconferencing system. The new video-enabled Flash Player quickly became one of the most popular means of deploying video on the World Wide Web. The Flash Player's ubiquity enabled Flash video to bypass a principal drawback of competing video technologies, which was the requirement for the end-user to download and install an additional browser plug-in or helper application. Other advantages of Flash video were the lack of "chrome" around the video player window which competing players typically displayed, and the customizability of the interface which enabled Web developers to create their own stylized video-playing widgets in Flash. Flash video is now an essential technology used by prominent Web sites such as YouTube, NBC.com, DailyMotion, MetaCafe and JumpCut. Breeze Ben Dillon and Peter Santangeli went on to found the Breeze team at Macromedia, building an enterprise-class Web conferencing, E-Learning and collaboration system on top of the Flash Media Server. Gay served as the engineering lead and