Adobe abandons Flash on TVs as well as mobiles

Posted by Barry Flynn on November 10, 2011 2 comments

The Gigaom website says that yesterday’s ZDNET exclusive about Adobe abandoning Flash in favour of HTML-5 wasn’t confined to the mobile space.

In a statement released to Gigaom, an Adobe spokeperson reportedly confirmed it would no longer focus on porting the Flash plugin into web browsers on CE devices, either. The Adobe statement said:

“Adobe will continue to support existing licensees who are planning on supporting Flash Player for web browsing on digital home devices and are using the Flash Player Porting Kit to do so. However we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path.”

The late Steve Job’s long-standing opposition to the standard was no doubt influential in the move, since as a result, Flash was not supported on iPhones, iPods or iPads. In a famous open letter in April 2010, Jobs outlined his reasons for the Apple ban,arguing that “the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Jobs went on to predict that “new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too).”

UPDATE: Farncombe has published an analysis of how Adobe’s decision will impact service providers and connected TV platforms here.

Intel exits connected TV to focus on STBs, smartphones and laptops

Posted by Barry Flynn on October 12, 2011 1 comment

According to Bloomberg, Intel is abandoning plans to supply its processors to manufacturers of connected TVs, although it plans to maintain its presence in the TV set-top box market.

Bloomberg quoted an Intel spokesperson who described it as “a business decision where we’re taking those resources and applying them to corporate priorities.” Engineers in its Digital Home Group will now re-focus on tablets, smartphones and a new type of laptop Intel has dubbed the ‘Ultrabook’.

Intel’s ambitions for the connected TV market first emerged in 2007 in the shape of its ‘Canmore’ chip, later known as the CE 3100 media processor. The first iteration was demonstrated at an Intel Developers Forum in summer 2008, before becoming the enabling platform for the Yahoo Widget connected TV demos at CES 2009.

Its successor, the CE 4100, part of Intel’s low-powered Atom series, has scored some notable successes in the set-top box market – with Comcast in the US and Liberty Global in Europe, as well as with Google’s Google TV. However, the Atom series has failed to make any significant impact on manufacturers of connected TV sets.

IBC 2011 – The wall-size interactive display surfaces at NDS

Posted by Barry Flynn on September 12, 2011 No comments

Take a screen as big as a wall linked to a connected TV, open half a dozen of the OTT apps or widgets at once, and enlarge and scatter them around a centrally-displayed video image. In a nutshell, that’s the NDS ‘Surfaces’ concept: an imagined scenario of how future display technologies could be deployed that the technology company believes could be only five years away.

However, the dynamic visual experience this set-up makes available is considerably richer than that thumbnail sketch would suggest. Controlled through a tablet, ambient lighting can be varied, the video display expanded and shrunk, and different sets of widgets called up depending on who’s in the room. In one of the scenarios shown, a family breakfasting could have weather and travel information showing either side of a TV news bulletin ‘screen’, below which a display of contextual headlines (triggered by tags embedded in the news video stream) would continually update.

Other scenarios showed the entire wall being used for an expanded super HD movie viewing (with the lights dimmed), and a talent show invoking social media applications such as Twitter or Facebook around the screen, together with a voting app. One of the key notions involved is the triggering of changes in the display through meta-data in the broadcast stream.

Simon Parnall, UK Vice President Technology at NDS, said one of the motives behind the demonstration was a recognition that more attention needed to be paid to the consumer’s viewing experience. Given the continually expanding screen sizes available, the scenario being presented was not that far-fetched, he suggested.

The wall-sized video ‘surface’ apart, all the technologies used were available today, with the entire demonstration being run through a Google Chrome web browser using the new HTML-5 standard.

 

IBC 2011 – Harmonic: first HEVC commercial deployments in 2014?

Posted by Barry Flynn on September 12, 2011 1 comment

Encoding specialist Harmonic is expecting the new video compression standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) to have become an international standard by mid-2012, with commercial implementations beginning to use it in 2014.

Thierry Fautier, senior director of convergence solutions at Harmonic, said the target was for HEVC to be 50% more efficient than its predecessor, H.264/AVC. “Today, it’s running at around 30-35%,” he suggested. “I think a 50% gain will be achievable by mid-2012.”

As with its predecessors, the new compression system will on its introduction produce the most significant bit-rate savings with high-resolution video formats. “With SD, you won’t be able to squeeze it that much,” said Fautier. “But on HD [or Super HD] there will be a significant improvement. The more bits you throw at the new algorithm, the better it works.”

However, HEVC requires a five-fold increase in processing power over H.264/AVC, and Fautier stressed that the new technology was “not for tomorrow – it’s a long shot.”

Fautier also revealed that there was an ongoing debate within Harmonic about the use of software- rather than hardware-based encoding. While it was clear that for very specific types of scene, hardware encoding performed better, “for 80% of cases, we are finding that software is doing a good job.”

Fautier listed the advantages of a software-based approach as including the fact that it handled high processing requirements more cheaply, was more flexible (encoders could be upgraded more easily and cheaply), and had a reduced time to market.

IBC 2011 – DVB hopeful ‘T2-Lite’ will do better than DVB-H

Posted by Barry Flynn on September 9, 2011 No comments

Europe’s digital TV standards body, DVB, has formally unveiled its new ‘T2 Lite’ profile, designed to provide a subset of the full DVB-T2 specification which is optimised for mobiles and handheld devices.

DVB is hoping it will succeed where the first-generation mobile broadcast standard DVB-H failed, in part because – in the words of chairman Phil Laven – “mobile operators are going to have a serious problem of congestion on their networks” if video consumption on mobile devices continues to increase at current rates.

But Laven also pointed out that the new stripped-down, rugged profile allows the technology to be easily tested in the marketplace, because it can be integrated into a DVB-T2 multiplex without the need to build a dedicated network. This potentially makes its use more cost-effective than DVB-H.

BBC R&D experiments have shown that using a DVB-T2 multiplex normally carrying 40.2MBit/s (as in the UK Freeview HD profile), a T2 Lite channel could be squeezed into a 1.02MBit/s stream, with the DVB-T2 channels taking up the remaining 33.6MBit/s (the loss of 5-6 MBit/s is explained by the extra capacity devoted to making T2 Lite more robust).

Peter Siebert, DVB’s project director, promised that “very soon, all [DVB-] T2 chipsets will support T2 Lite.”