Adobe Media Player and Adobe TV launched
It’s been in public and private beta for quite some time now but today version 1 of the Adobe Media Player is live. I think AMP is a really good idea especially for “road-warriors” like myself. AMP allows broadcasters to easily push out ad-supported content to whoever is subscribed to it. Broadcasters can also easily skin the player and add commercials by using simple RSS-feeds and SMIL.
Once you subscribe to a feed, AMP (running on AIR) automatically downloads new episodes when they are available. Once downloaded, you can watch it wherever you want be it on the train, airplane or basically anywhere where you don’t have an internet connection. This really is what I want from online tv. I really think online tv right now is failing because of crappy internet in hotel rooms and public places. Having the ability to download your favorite shows over night would partly solve this since I would be able to watch it the next day.
I’ve actually built something like this myself. I have a MacMini at home that records my favorite shows (although not a lot of them) and then uploads them to my server. A little PHP script automatically makes an RSS feeds from whatever files are new in the video folder. In the morning I download my new shows and can then watch them whenever, wherever I want. That’s basically the idea behind AMP except in this case it’s the broadcasters publishing the new video content.
Together with AMP, we also just launched Adobe TV which has some really good tutorials on how to use Adobe products and you can also subscribe to the Adobe TV channel in AMP.
Upcoming events I will be attending/speaking at
I wanted to quickly write this post to let you know about some events that are on my calendar and that I will be speaking at. If you are coming to any of these events, please don’t hesitate to come and say “hi”. Also, if you are working on a cool RIA running in the browser or on the desktop, I really want to know about it. So hope to see you at one of these events:
- April 12th – Adobe D-Day – Dubai, UAE
http://www.ddayme.com - April 17th – Flex Camp – Cairo, Egypt
- May 8th – FlashConference – Stuttgart, Germany
http://flashconference.de/ - May 21st – FF2k8 – Cologne, Germany
http://ffk08.flashforum.de/ - May 23rd – Multi-Mania – Kortrijk, Belgium
http://www.multi-mania.be
When does copyrighting go too far?
My home town Mechelen (Belgium) is having an exhibition about the world expo in Belgium in 1958. One of the only remaining buildings from that year’s world expo is the Atomium, one of the most recognized buildings in Belgium. When tourists visit Belgium, this is on their agenda. Obviously, a lot of pictures are taken in front of the Atomium.
The exhibition in Mechelen was supposed to show these types of photos. Photos of people who had visited Belgium during the world expo. Sounds very innocent, right? Well… Since the Atomium was/is such a prominent building on the world expo site, it’s obvious that this appears in a lot of photos. According to copyright laws, they can’t show the pictures. Well… They can show the pictures but it can’t have the Atomium in it. Every time the image of the Atomium is shown, they (and actually, you too) have to pay a copyright fee, get written approval from the company that manages the building and to top it off, every photo must have the “(c) vzw Atomium” copyright line.
The exhibitor has found a creative way to get around that and is now looking for 100 Photoshoppers to cut out the Atomium from all of the exhibited photos. That just seems wrong to me. I mean, it’s totally cool that they are specifically asking for Photoshoppers (Photoshop being an Adobe product :D) but the reason why seems wrong to me. The Atomium is a public building and a landmark that was (probably) paid for with tax payer’s money but you can’t show pictures from it without paying copyrights to the building owner. So that got me wondering where this copyright-fee goes to? Does it go back to the owners of the building, in this case the tax payers? I think not…
So when does copyrighting go too far? I think this would be an excellent example.
Online TV is failing
Zattoo, Joost, Hulu, iWatch (in Belgium), … they all want to bring TV to the web and to my honest opinion, most of them are seriously failing. First of all, all these services are depending on your current internet connection and that’s their biggest mistake. Why, you ask? Simple. I’m on the road a lot and that is really the only time I would consider watching TV online (if there’s anything decent to follow in the first place, off course). And that’s where the problems start. Hotel internet is in this case the only internet connection I have available to me and if you’ve ever tried hotel internet, you know that that’s not always the best and most reliable connection you can get. Most hotels claim they have high speed internet but when 100′s of people are using it at the same time, it’s not so high speed no more.
How to stay up to date on the onAIR tour escapades
We just arrived in Paris (our second stop for the onAIR Tour Europe) after what must have the longest train ride ever. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a longer train ride in my entire life. So… Imagine that feeling when you just came off a really fast rollercoaster ride. You step out of the car and you still feel the earth move under your feet. Now imagine doing that for 12 hours and you get a bit of an idea how some of us are feeling right now. Like Kevin Hoyt Twittered earlier, it feels like the whole building is moving.
Most of use Twittered as much as we could on our cellphones… right up until those batteries died too. Mike Chambers even thought about coding in the toilet since that was the only place where there was a powerplug on the train.
Anyway, if you want to keep up to date with our escapades on the road in Europe, here’s some links to help you:
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