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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."
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!
We need Free and Open Media Standards.
Adobe's press release here, BBC's article here
Meta will eat itself
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.
Looks like that's another nail in Silverlight's coffin.
Summation 2
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
:T:R:A:N:S:
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).
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Now I can be Rickrolled via my TV for the whole family to enjoy!
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
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.
yvan eht nioj
I think that Flash [buffering...]
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
peanuts and circuses. both are directed in a very metered and concerted manner, so if flash benefits all parties in the P&C industry it will become standard...
this gives also adobe content managers a medium by which their flash cannot be blocked. Flash means rendering and encoding the fast motion graphics the human eye pays the most attention to is now offloaded to the consumer instead of a rendering division at the television station. expect it to pop up during the superbowl and offer pizzas, cars, music and other items you'd enjoy at the circus.. it serves to enhance the circus, not supplant and overtake it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Another proposal:
Base it on Java instead, call it MHP and let it painfully die..... again.
OTOH, the time may be right for a standard for "interactive" TV
bickerdyke
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.
Meta will eat itself
seems to me that Flash is becoming everything Java wanted to be back in the 90s
...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.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
..a tv with a glaring large "Press ESC to exit full screen mode". Okay, I'm willing to swing this if we make a promise to use less flash content on the web.
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.
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.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
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
Flash can play multiple formats, so just because you don't like flv doesn't mean you can't use something else, like h264.
If I get to use the larger TV screen, I bet next time I can punch the monkey for sure!
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
This is definitely NOT good advice for most people.
It works for the propagation of the species.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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.
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).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!