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."

Comments

NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

We need Free and Open Media Standards.

Re:NO

[its_schwim]

"A little more open" doesn't cut it, in my humble opinion. Open is open. Offering certain aspects up for grabs is called marketing, not open. The day I buy a television with flash capability is the day I record the event on my Betamax.

Re:NO

[oldspewey]

How open is your current cable feed?

Re:NO

[its_schwim]

Yours would be a viable argument if you were suggesting that people would get rid of cable to only use flash. However, since we're stacking one proprietary technology onto another, you're asking "What's the big deal, you've already got one closed source. What will it hurt to add another?"

Current feeds will be going nowhere. Adobe is just throwing their hat into the ring.

Re:NO

[lordtoran]

You don't have to wait for a few hours. Just play a flash game that displays a lot of sprites. At some amount of onscreen content, all of a sudden the framerate collapses to near-zero and the symptoms you mentioned occur.

Re:NO

[relguj9]

Again, this seems like blaming a memory leak in C++ on the programming language rather than on the failure to cleanup objects or do garbage collection.

Re:NO

[CSMatt]

The day I can plug in a tuner card or TV set or anything else directly into the digital cable feed and have the thing work without CableCARD or other such nonsense is the day that digital cable becomes "open."

No thank you

[T-Bone-T]

Flash sucks bad enough on actual computers. I really can't see what it offers that a powerful computer hooked up to your TV can't. I'd also rather not spend a good chunk of change on the processing power necessary to display Flash. It already brings my Pentium 4 to its knees.

Re:No thank you

[STEVEOO6]

"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.

"It Just Works..."
- An extremely powerful and often overlooked notion

Re:No thank you

[SydShamino]

Oh, is that all? I can watch a live event with just a tv and cable plugged into its back.

And how do you do that when the live event isn't being carried on that cable, because you don't pay for service or your provider simply doesn't carry the feed?

So the wireless router, cables and receiver were all free?

For someone who already has a computer, a home wireless network, and a big modern television, but who wants to watch streaming video on a bigger screen, yes. Things I already own, when used in a new application, are free for that new application. I bought and paid for the items for a different application, and "got my money's worth" for that other purpose, so anything extra is, well, a free extra.

Re:No thank you

[Opportunist]

You're probably not the target audience.

The target audience is Joe Shmoe who knows just enough about his computer to not shove the USB stick into the floppy drive. If that.

Joe doesn't want to figure out a way how to plug his computer, which is somewhere in his "home office" (aka lumber-room), into the flatscreen he has in the living room that's halfway across his home. He wants a cheap box that he hooks up to the spare internet jack that the friendly guy from his internet provider tacked to his living room wall for the handful of greens he slipped into his pocket, and that puts "the internet" on his TV.

Whether that's Flash or Shlaf, Joe doesn't care. He wants it to work without tinkering with it.

I know it's hard to understand, and I barely can myself, but there's a lot of people who don't want to know how their tech toys work, they just want them to be simple and working. They also don't disassemble their TV set-top boxes when they break down to see what's insides. Hard to grasp that idea, I know. But they really are a huge market.

Re:No thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

6. You use any operating system other than Windows.

Re:No thank you

[dswensen]

Ah yes, the inviolate "it works for ME!" argument.

Good ol' rock. Nothing beats rock!

Re:No thank you

[Nyeerrmm]

I'm guessing you're a Windows user. Flash Player for OS X or Linux tends to be much slower. I can be running on modern processors with plenty of memory, and while it doesn't usually stutter or skip (which is usually attributable to bad internet), it does use a lot of processor, heating the machine incredibly.

Of course, if you're designing a machine specifically to run flash, I'm guessing you can optimize it for Flash and not have the same issues.

Re:No thank you

[PitaBred]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
- Arthur C. Clarke

I believe that a large portion of the population is at the stage where electronics and computers are "magic", even if they don't call it that.

Um no...

[Lumpy]

Watching the Low quality youtube on my 42" is a painful experience. I deleted my XBMC plugin that does youtube because of that.

Why not simply make the freaking interface in the TV 100% open and let people do what they want? Or better yet, leave the TV to be a dumb monitor and use an external box? OMG is it so bad to have a 8"X8"X2" box hidden behind it?

The only thing I need in the TV is an rs232 interface with discreet on,off, all settings and feedback. (Yes my panasonic has this and I use it)

What is it with the fetish to put everything inside the TV? My old RCA Scenium had the built in WEB system and that never worked right.

Re:Um no...

[tepples]

Why not simply make the freaking interface in the TV 100% open and let people do what they want? Or better yet, leave the TV to be a dumb monitor and use an external box?

For one thing, people already have too many external boxes plugged into the TV, to the point where they need more external boxes to switch among several inputs. Some people chose the PlayStation 2 over the GameCube and the PLAYSTATION 3 over the Wii because owners of Nintendo consoles would "need another box" to play movie discs.

Re:Um no...

[Anonymous Coward]

uh.. fine, but this doesn't take into account the fact that YouTube is continuously adding better resolution options, they already offer around minimal high def and fairly soon they will probably even offer up to 1080.

You're making the same mistake as they did in the late 1990s when critics complained about the "postage stamp size" video. Of course the tech is going to get better as time goes on.

 

Re:Um no...

[silver007]

An animated gif can reach near-hi-def quality if enough resources are allocated to its 'improvement'. That doesn't make it feasible. We have these cool things called video formats that I prefer my, um, video to be in.

Re:Um no...

[thedonger]

For one thing, people already have too many external boxes plugged into the TV...

The answer isn't to add more things to the TV. The answer is to consolidate the boxes outside the TV.

Historically, bundling peripherals into the TV rarely captures more than a niche market. And whatever they put in there will need to be firmware or software update-capable, lest your TV outlive your Flash capabilities.

Re:Um no...

[denis-The-menace]

[quote]What is it with the fetish to put everything inside the TV? [/quote]

-For the consumer: The illusion that it will be easy to use for technophobes (50+).
-For the corps: The illusion that people will tolerate commercials on it like a TV.

Re:Um no...

[master811]

Not everything in flash is low/poor quality. Just because YouTube's quality is crap, doesn't mean it has to be.

The high quality version of iPlayer looks surprisingly good on my 42".

Re:Um no...

[NineNine]

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 certainly don't. Listening to music coming straight out of a computer with no real amp is like listening to AM radio a la 1920. It's generally total crap, even if you have a decent sound card. My computer runs all of my music at home, but it goes through an Indigo sound card, into a 400 watt Yamaha receiver into a pair of 5' JVC speakers. Huge difference. I can rattle the house if I want, and it still sounds great. Try doing that with a computer and some dinky speakers!

Only 1 problem with that

[Fortunato_NC]

Content providers don't want Hulu on your TV. The Boxee debacle proves that. Right now, they can't monetize the eyeballs delivered via Hulu as well as they can as the ones delivered via broadcast and cable. Until they figure out a way to do that, they're going to make it as painful as they can for you to get "TV" over the Internet. Look at how the amount of content on Hulu has actually shrunk lately (fewer full runs or full seasons of shows available, more "preview" and last three broadcast episodes shows).

Different revenue

[Whatanut]

This doesn't really make getting rid of cable an option for many people. It might open up some options. But for many, the best option for a decent internet connection is still the cable provider. This won't get rid of them. It may change the revenue stream a bit, though. Raise your hand if you think they won't whine and complain about any and all changes to a business model.

Re:Hear's my strongly worded opinion!

[AndrewNeo]

No, no, you're thinking of RealPl[buffering...]

Awesome!

[fluffernutter]

Now I get to watch amateur Sarah Palin impersonations and five minute clips of Flinstones episodes on my big screen TV? I can't wait!!

Blame the summary

[tygerstripes]

Most of the companies to sign up to the Flash platform are, as far as I can tell, chip-fabs and set-top manufacturers, NOT TV-makers. Sony and Samsung, for example, have not signed up.

The fact that the summary and the linked article don't make this clear is very annoying. We're seeing a steady shift in /. articles away from facts and direct-source links (hence my FP), and towards rhetoric and spin. I'd harp on about how much this pisses me off and skews the whole discussion, but I've already strayed off-topic.

I agree with your position, but it's basically moot. This will primarily emerge in set-top boxes - at least until it's had chance to become mainstream.

JAVA

[ionix5891]

seems to me that Flash is becoming everything Java wanted to be back in the 90s

This will probably get heavily flamed...

[hbean]

...but this is why were seeing TimeWarner lead the charge towards total GB/month bandwidth limits. Between Netflix, XBox Live movie downloads, iTunes, Hulu, etc etc, they're seeing their business model being slowly put to the wayside for more and more content delivered over the internet.

Not necessarily saying it's a bad thing, it's great. It's long past time for the government sanctioned monopolies that are your local cable company to come to an end, but they're certainly not going to go w/out a fight. Hard download caps are the first volley in a war that's probably going to get rather unpleasant before its over.

Unless of course....

[HeavyDevelopment]

you get your internet from the cable company. Then you are at least stuck with them partially. Which is my current problem in that I get my TV from space--AKA satellite/ErecTV. I would ditch Time Warner in a heartbeat only if my only other broadband choice wasn't ATT. Talk about frying pan and into the fire. Actually, more like frying pan straight into the depths of hell.

Linux on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of HDTVs run Linux now a days. I bet you that this will extend the current OS in the TV to take advantage of Flash. Now the real question is are we finally going to get a Linux Flash version that doesn't suck? :-P

jeez everybody relax

[circletimessquare]

this is just an opening salvo

the comments here act as if this is the last television upgrade ever

give it time people, calm the fuck down. everyone understands your complaints before you even speak them as your complaints really aren't that insightful but rather obvious

technology evolves, so wait and see and chill out

Money...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Put their money where their mouth is?

And yes, they can. Sun open sourced Java, and had a few libraries which had to be rewritten, as third parties owned the code -- that ended up being nowhere near all of the standard libraries. Are you really saying third parties own all of the renderer?

Even Microsoft pays a few people to work on Moonlight, because they want to have a competing, open player. And ATI and nVidia seem to ultimately want to completely replace their proprietary Linux drivers with open ones, though it's not a priority now.

Never mind that the proprietary player sucks balls, and has for over a decade. It even sucks at vector graphics, relative to some of the other options. And it is absolutely the worst video player I have ever seen, in terms of video quality, CPU usage (two orders of magnitude higher than its nearest competition), and reliability (locking up my browser for a few seconds while loading a flash ad is not acceptable).