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

*sigh*

[tygerstripes]

Adobe's press release here, BBC's article here

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

[xaxa]

"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: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

[tygerstripes]

Rule 34. Forget it at your peril.

Silverlight

[Rik Sweeney]

Looks like that's another nail in Silverlight's coffin.

Re:Silverlight

[rumith]

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.

Re:Silverlight

[Bazer]

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.

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...

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...

[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: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".

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).

Oh, good

[Oxy the moron]

Now I can be Rickrolled via my TV for the whole family to enjoy!

Hear's my strongly worded opinion!

[Dystopian Rebel]

I think that Flash [buffering...]

Re:Hear's my strongly worded opinion!

[AndrewNeo]

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

ultimately its

[nimbius]

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.

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

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

[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 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.