Jed Wood pointed me to an article from one of the engineers of the flash player, stating Flash is going to start supporting H.264 video (in essence, mpeg4). So yes, this means you can play MOVs in flash, if they are using H.264 and the AAC audio codec.

The signs were already there, as ON2 announced H.264 support in their flix product line, but now it's official.

This pretty much means the death of the proprietary FLV format, which was both from a business and a technical standpoint inferior. Before flash supported a subset of H.263 (a.k.a. Sorenson Spark) and VP6. Although converters for H.263 have been available for a long time, the actual FLV format (wrapper) and the much better VP6 codec remained 'officially' inaccessible. MPEG4 is still a patented technology, but at least there is now a wide range of choices and software to produce this.

The new flash media server, which can be used for video (up and down)streaming will also start supporting this. It's not clear to me if the proprietary Nellymoser codec, which is used for recording audio from the flashplayer will also be replaced.

I wonder what this means for ON2, who just lost their single key selling point for their Flix software. They never had transparent pricing for their (buggy) Flix engine, so now they will lose the fact that they were the only way to go if you wanted to convert video using a modern codec.