Adobe Media Player and Adobe TV launched

Posted by on Apr 9, 2008 in Video | 3 comments

Adobe Media PlayerIt’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.

Online TV is failing

Posted by on Apr 2, 2008 in Industry, Rants, Video | 3 comments

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.