Adobe Pushing For Flash TVs 345
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."
*Argh!* (Score:3, Interesting)
We need open media standards! I wish flash would just die. I'm a web designer and when asked to produce flash content, I say "N O". And explain to my client why.
Just imagine how the Internet would be if Adobe controlled your image file format too.
Re:Silverlight (Score:2, Interesting)
in the form of screwing over the entire planet with a physical lock in for another proprietary piece of crap?
no thanks.
I'd like options other than flash on my monitors, as opposed to a tv that will not function as a monitor because "flash is good enough".
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No thank you (Score:4, Interesting)
It may not change very quickly right now due to the economy, but I'm pretty sure most new TVs have PC-In and more PCs are coming with HDMI. All you need is a VGA or HDMI cable and an audio cable. It is amazing how many cool things there are to do that most people don't know about that only require one or two cables and equipment they already have. My wife and I watched a live event streamed over the internet using a wireless router, a laptop, a TV, and a receiver. It beat the hell out of watching it on just the laptop and we didn't even have to buy anything extra.
Re:No thank you (Score:2, Interesting)
Flash - Why?
Video - TV does this very well already ?!
Animation - See above
Interactivity - Why use flash?
There are much much simpler lighter solutions than flash .... it is used on PC's now mostly for Video simply as container/player not for it's advanced interactive features ....
Re:No thank you (Score:2, Interesting)
>>Video - TV does this very well already ?!
I think this is a good point. However, this whole debate is fueled by the fact (IMHO) that cable companies want hordes of ca$h for their on-demand services thru a DVR.
If cable companies would start charging more reasonable prices for their on-demand content, (like$0.99 cents/movie, or even $1.99, instead of four bucks a pop) this debate would probably go away and flash would play nice on the computer.
If cable companies could think straight, they could bury companies like Netflix, etc. But because of their lack of understanding of reasonable pricing and of what the consumer wants, alternatives will flourish.
Flash Player != Flash flv format (Score:3, Interesting)
Flash can play multiple formats, so just because you don't like flv doesn't mean you can't use something else, like h264.
Re:No thank you (Score:5, Interesting)
"I really can't see what it offers that a powerful computer hooked up to your TV can't"
That's just the point. I do not want to have to connect my TV to my computer. I want to plug my television in, i want to sit on my couch, and i only want to have to think about what buttons to press on my remote. It's called simplicity.
I worked for a large electronics company on an IPTV system a couple of years ago. Everything came from the internet -- the schedule, the video streams, extra information about programmes.
At no point could you tell it was running Java on a tiny embedded Linux box with some fancy video & audio decoding chips.
Everything was easily navigated using the four coloured buttons on the remote, plus the arrow keys. It was as simple as normal digital television, although with more information available. (It was also built with completely open standards, except for all the electronics companies patenting everything they could think of, and then getting pissed off with the patent troll companies trying to mess up the standards to get "their" ideas in.)
I expect Flash would be similar. Back when I was working for the company (2007) there were discussions about having a TV that ran Javascript, with the electronic programme guides in HTML and SVG.
Re:Um no... (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of your standard stereo unit. Nobody plugs things directly into the speakers. They plug it into the central box, and that central box has a selector mechanism that allows you to choose which audio signal gets to the speakers.
No offense, but the "standard stereo unit" is about 3 inches long, two inches wide, a quarter inch thick, and boots with a fruit-shaped logo on the screen. Many, many people, myself included, find a "home electronics system" as you describe to be very much a product of the 1990s - and very much out of date.
I'm much happier to have as few boxes as possible, and just plug them directly into the TV.
Great idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, this sounds like Good News for the industry. An API for set top boxes that is more open than OpenTV, and has a sensible desktop client which can preview what it will look like on deployed machines?
Flash can scale for 4:3 and 16:9 machines instead of having a single bitmap font (cf: opentv, mheg, liberate). It antialiases fonts properly (cf: liberate, or 'at all' wrt opentv/mheg). It renders predictably (cf: ce-html). It allows you to use your own display fonts (cf: liberate, mheg), and predict how much content will display per page programatically (scrolling bad, paging good).
It allows for compression of content using zlib, for vector, resolution-independent graphics (smaller than the equivalent, SD-res jpeg).
I'm just hoping it gets deployed widely and that they find a sensible way to have a hardware player.
Re:No thank you (Score:1, Interesting)
It may not change very quickly right now due to the economy, but I'm pretty sure most new TVs have PC-In and more PCs are coming with HDMI. All you need is a VGA or HDMI cable and an audio cable. It is amazing how many cool things there are to do that most people don't know about that only require one or two cables and equipment they already have. My wife and I watched a live event streamed over the internet using a wireless router, a laptop, a TV, and a receiver. It beat the hell out of watching it on just the laptop and we didn't even have to buy anything extra.
Also, DVI == HDMI.
http://www.amazon.com/DVI-HDMI-Cable-6ft-Male-Male/dp/B0002CZHN6 [amazon.com]
So really, just about every PC capable of rendering high quality video can be connected to a TV with HDMI. Not to mention a lot of HDTV's have a VGA connection. I mean really, HDTV's make the PC->TV connection trivial. As you said, they're just big monitors. Get a sound card with optical out and you're rocking.
Just use MPEG4 / H264 (Score:3, Interesting)
Why even bother with the Adobe "Tax", when you can just use MPEG4 with H264. Surely that's all Flash does anyhow? The only third-party software that I would look forward to on my set top box is VLC.
Re:No thank you (Score:3, Interesting)
Weird. I've got a Linux machine that's a PIII-800, with 256MB RAM, running the latest Debian.
Runs Youtube just fine. Takes a couple of seconds to get the vid loaded and intialized, but once it's playing it's fine.
You're right, though, the non-IE versions of Flash take a crapload of processor time.
Re:Um no... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No thank you (Score:2, Interesting)
Makes me wonder how Adobe is going to get this running on some other arches like ARM or w/e they use in TVs.
Re:No thank you (Score:3, Interesting)
The latest crop of flash ads fairly consistently hang both Safari and FireFox on my (Intel) Mac laptop, too. It has gotten so bad that I've resorted to the clicktoflash WebKit plug-in. And flash is the #1 most common cause of browser crashes for me, too. Nearly every crash I've ever seen in Safari contains Flash plug-in symbols in the backtrace. I have seen two or three non-Flash Safari crashes in all the years I've used Safari, versus about two or three crashes per week that are directly attributable to Flash, so at least anecdotally, it seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more common than all the other Safari crasher bugs put together.
The day Flash appears in a TV I buy is the day I stop watching TV. Period. I'd rather stab myself repeatedly with an icepick than buy a TV set infested with that miserable crapware. I'd rather shove toothpicks under my fingernails and go swimming in a pool filled with lemon juice than buy a TV set with that lousy software. I'd rather send death threats to the President than run Flash on my TV. I would rather go the rest of my life with only a Discover card in my wallet than let that fetid piece of pestilence anywhere near my TV set. I think that about sums it up.
I'd like to believe that TV set manufacturers couldn't possibly be stupid enough to fall for this. I certainly hope so, anyway. The absolute last thing the world needs is broader Flash adoption. Heck, I'd even take Java over Flash, and that's saying something....
Re:Just use MPEG4 / H264 (Score:3, Interesting)
When a trivial Firefox addon can download the flv, and a one-click application can re-encapsulate it as an avi or an mp4 (since flvs can carry h264), that argument starts to look really stupid.
DRM never works, but this is DRM that, again, is defeated by a Firefox extension. Also by a proxy, for that matter, or any number of other ways.
Broadcasters shouldn't care, anyway. They don't outlaw VCRs or DVRs, why would this bother them? VHS didn't stop people from buying cable -- if anything, it added to the value of the cable and prompted them to buy more.
Re:NO (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Gnash on Ubuntu 9.04... on my EeePC... 900... in Firefox... watching YouTube videos... just fine... and it suffers from not having support for realtime audio in the Linux kernel.
Or they could, like Adobe (I-D-I-O-T-S-!), let it consume 100% CPU...
Re:Silverlight (Score:3, Interesting)