Dale, picked up on this great video from Building43, where Adobe (Anup Muraka – Director of Technology & Strategy) is talking with Robert Scoble about Flash across Platforms, including non-PC ones, such as set top boxes, TVs, and mobile devices.

Watch “Flashy Future of TV”

Anup shows a demo of a streaming high quality 1080 Flash Video (from ON) across a connection from a Flash Media Server down to a Flash interface on a HDTV. Very cool.

Among many statements, he also eludes to there possibly being an OEM delivering a Flash UI based setup box as early as end of year (sounded like Flash Lite 3.x to me). This would be one of the first devices part of the “Flash on Digital Home” initative’s talked about by Adobe, earlier this year. From the video commentary, it’s clear Flash 10 is coming to SmartPhones first (e.g. Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, webOS), and *then* other consumer devices, like set top boxes (which makes sense given the hardware in a lot of the set top boxes, today … means an optimized Flash player, which means, most likely Flash Lite 3.x to start with).

In regards to seeing Flash content (here a video) on a large TV screen … I recall a keynote from FITC 2006 in which Adobe (then Macromedia) demonstrated a similar experience to what is shown here, with a lot of “sharing and viewing” features. Pretty cool to see if actually implemented, instead of the vision piece.

Well, to be fair, I believe Japan and possibly Korea have been doing Flash on set top boxes for years (back in the Macromedia days). Finally, it’s hitting outside of the Far East, here in the U.S.? Strange given the amount of TV here. Well, on-demand movies, guides, and even widgets are finally hitting mass appeal … lots of changing habits with digital media these days … hopefully we can help spice up the experience a bit with tools, Adobe provides.

I also agree with Scoble on changing habits. I can honestly say I do 90% more viewing of TV program content via boxee, and hulu than watching on a physical TV. My digital media consumption has changed quick a bit over last 2 years. I get it via multiple sources, and a lot of it is from my PC and mobile devices now (and some of it via my little friend, the chumby).

Larger screen is always nice, though … so adding in the capabilities such as sharing and other services into a setup box and other consumer electronic devices can only a good thing … just make it a great experience … when I first got my Verizon FIOS several years ago, I got really turned off by the slow, and confusing interface for the guide, etc. It’s only been last year that I actually went to using the interactive guide … the number of widgets available with Verizon is shameful (weather, traffic, that’s it???). Hopefully that changes (well to be honest, I haven’t visited that section recently just cause from my 1st experience).

Going forward, it will be cool to be able to plug-in little custom AIR-like apps into TVs … however, my guess is that a lot of these platforms will be closed and proprietary by OEM (and so too will be the work) … however, I imagine a few will be open as well, for impendent designers, developers and small companies to take advantage of.

Interesting to note also the comment about Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe fighting for the next best TV experience. It would be nice to think Adobe might win with Flash Video, given it’s (usually) considered a champ on the Web, but Apple and Microsoft are excellent competition in this area, given the directions they are pushing as well.

Overall, I think the video shows a lot of promise that Adobe can bring a lot of value to the user with a Flash experience across TVs. It’s a big challenge, but one I think they might be able to accomplish now that there is growing parity between next generation Flash Players.

I guess we’ll see, going into 2010, how this all pans out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under Flash Lite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.