Slashdot Mirror
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."
Adobe's press release here, BBC's article here
Meta will eat itself
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*.
another proprietary piece of crap
Wake up, it's 2009 already. Adobe has published the SWF specification (version 10, no less) almost a year ago.
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.
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 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.
Get a web developer
I think Rob Savoye of Gnash, the GPL Flash project would beg to differ 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.
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...