Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn I'm old...).
Are you referring to the SWF file format?
I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable that does work on a phone.
Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small portrait screens, and more but they never did make it responsive AFAIK.