Adobe Pushing For Flash TVs

Drivintin writes "In a move that should make cable companies nervous, Adobe announces they are going to push a Flash that runs directly on TVs. 'Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, wants to extend Flash's reach even further. On Monday, Adobe's chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.' With the ability to run Hulu, YouTube and others, the question of dropping your cable becomes a little bit more reasonable."

*sigh*

[tygerstripes]

Adobe's press release here [adobe.com], BBC's article here [bbc.co.uk]

Re:NO

[nicolas.kassis]

Flash is moving to be a little more open. Heck, you can currently use an opensource streaming server (red5) and opensource flash clients/players

Open standards

[Anonymous Coward]

What Adobe is of course neglecting to say is that they do this solely to get their feet in the TV-market early-on, before open standards like CE-HTML [wikipedia.org] that strive to accomplish similar things get a strong foothold.
Some companies such as Philips [engadget.com] are using that alternative language in its latest sets. Others, [yahoo.com] like Samsung, are using proprietary standards.

I know where my preference lies...

YouTube uses video formats

[tepples]

We have these cool things called video formats that I prefer my, um, video to be in.

YouTube uses video formats: FLV by Sorenson for viewers on Flash 7 set-top boxes, and H.264 for viewers on PCs and phones that can do H.264. But video formats like H.264 aren't optimal for cel or sprite animations like those seen on Newgrounds; a vector animation format like SWF can handle those more efficiently.

Re:Um no...

[TooMuchToDo]

My Samsung A650 52" LCD has a network jack, and can do firmware upgrades. Samsung is building the ability to watch Netflix Watch It Now *directly into their new LCD TVs*.

Re:Silverlight

[rumith]

another proprietary piece of crap

Wake up, it's 2009 already. Adobe has published [adobe.com] the SWF specification (version 10, no less) almost a year ago.

Re:NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs are open (without restrictions), the VM is even open source. I don't know how much more open they could be other than open-sourcing the renderer part of their player (which they can't do due to third-party licenses) or submitting it to a standards body.

Re:NO

[datapharmer]

Digital cable is actually is pretty open... most cable boxes are MPEG-2 based just like DVD. That is also the preferred format of the government for digital archiving. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/video_preferences.shtml [digitalpreservation.gov] That said the companies do all sorts of funky stuff to mess with the MPEG-2 standard, but that is the cable company's fault. My problem with flash isn't it being more open (though that would be nice), it is that if I have anything flash open on my computer it eats up memory and runs the heat through the roof. I don't know what is messed up in their code, but it can be sitting idle int he background and it will eventually bring my computer to a crawl. I've tried on dell desktop, acer laptops - one xp one vista, and on both a powerbook and a macbook and the results are the same: open a flash movie, animation, etc. minimize it, forget about it. realize that computer starts to get REALLY slow after a few hours and the fan runs full blast. Close flash, fan stops, computer returns to normal operation.

Re:Silverlight

[Bazer]

I think Rob Savoye of Gnash, the GPL Flash project would beg to differ [youtube.com] on it's relevance. I recommend viewing the whole interview as he touches on the subject of legal traps in Adobe's agreements which you need to sign if you want to get the specification.

Re:Flash Player != Flash flv format

[Bazer]

Maybe I'm nitpicking but you're comparing a container and a video codec. A more appropriate comparison would be between flv and mp3 or between Sorenson h.263(or VP6) and h.264. I wouldn't call these 3 codecs "multiple choices".

Re:Um no...

[TheQuantumShift]

I recently bought a new ps2 almost solely to play dvd's (and to avoid starting my FFXII game over). Sure my ps3 is backwards compatible and does play dvd's, but even with upscaling and all that turned off, I get to listen to wwhhhiiiiirrRRRRRR!!!! during 480p playback. And the ps2 works with my universal remote. It's going to be interesting when the ps3 dies, not too sure I'll be replacing it unless there's a redesign that cools effectively and doesn't require me to "pair" a bluetooth device using a usb cable.

Re:Silverlight

[jomiolto]

From that video: "If you've ever installed the Flash Plugin, you can't work on Gnash."

Seriously, WTF? That can't be true, can it? If you've installed Adobe Flash even once, you can never work on Gnash again? (or other Flash projects, I guess).

Sheesh, talk about restrictive licensing...

xbox360

[mzs]

I was very surprised at how easy it was and how well this worked, but over the weekend I finally paired-up my xbox360 and vista 64-bit with tv pack 2008 media center. Then I fired-up the media center on the xbox 360 and it was virtually indistinguishable from running media center from the computer on the TV. My son was able to play RCT3 on the computer while my wife watched recorded TV on the computer from the xbox 360, all using a remote control that looks like a TV/DVD combo remote. It was better than AppleTV, I was surprised that I had not heard more about just how good this combo of vista + media center + xbox360 is.

The xbox360 also lets me watch streamed NetFlix movies. My Samsung TV also allows me to get lots of content over the internet. I see Philips TVs that do similar things. I think Adobe sees this and is afraid that in the future they will be less relevant as people spend their idle time on the couch once more.

Re:Silverlight

[Anonymous Coward]

What agreement? The link in the posting above goes to a page with a link to a PDF file "SWF File Format Specification Version 10". It didn't make me agree to anything.

Is the stereo dead?

[Jay L]

Listening to music coming straight out of a computer with no real amp is like listening to AM radio a la 1920.

Yes, if the radio could play any song you wanted it to at any moment.

Come visit Berklee School of Music some time, and hang around the recording studios. 500 top-performing students in a highly-competitive music production program, at a school that's generated a hell of a lot of the music you probably listen to. Eight full-size recording studios, plus countless smaller synth labs.

Your Indigo sound card is... cute. We've got a few SSLs, a jillion Pro Tools HD3 Accel rigs, dozens of vintage outboard pieces, studio monitors the size of your bicycle, etc. And any second-semester production student could explain the Nyquist theorem, quantization error, jitter, etc., and do bit-rate calculations in their heads. One two-semester class is nothing but listening to white noise and writing down which single band on the graphic equalizer is up or down 3dB. If there's ever been a building full of people who know why the iPod is not good music, this is that building.

You know what the most popular addition to the studios has been? A few years ago, they made up some 1/8"-to-TT cables for the SSL patch bays. Now, we can plug our iPods into the SSL.

Yeah, I think the stereo's dead.

Re:NO

[V!NCENT]

Here you have it in PDF, the full video specs, straifght from www.adobe.com; http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/pdf/video_file_format_spec_v9.pdf [adobe.com]

Now that we got the obvious out of the way... GIVE MEH MAH EVOLVED TELEVIZIONS NOW! MOAR!!111

Re:No thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

DVI != HDMI.

DVI + HDCP == HDMI, ignoring mechanical details.

The purpose of this line is to get past the filter that doesn't understand that sometimes caps are a necessary evil.