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View Full Version : Adobe Announces the Open Screen Project


Darius Wey
05-02-2008, 02:36 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/' target='_blank'>http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/</a><br /><br /></div><em>&quot;Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Open Screen Project, supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment -- taking advantage of Adobe&reg; Flash&reg; Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR&trade; -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment is intended to provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.&quot;</em><br /><br /><img alt="" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/500/spt/auto/1209733936.usr2.jpg" /><br /><br />Adobe, in a typical <a target="_blank" href="http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200804/050108AdobeOSP.html">long-winded</a> manner, recently announced the opening up of Flash in an attempt to enable consistency in content delivery across a wide range of devices, including set top boxes and mobile phones. In what is most likely a response to Silverlight and HTML 5, the industry initiative sees the removal of restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V, the removal of licensing fees, and the publishing of multiple APIs and protocols. Definitely a step forward. Any developers and designers care to weigh in with their thoughts?

SteveHoward999
05-02-2008, 05:48 PM
Adobe has been talking about this publicly, in general terms, for almost a year. I don't think it's a *respose* to Silverlight, since the current public (not beta) iteration of Silverlight is about where Flash 6 was 5 years or so ago.

This is a great initiative, as it opens the door for single-source applications that can be delivered to any supporting device. It also opens the door to an updatable player, rather than one that comes with the device and is not upgradable.

I've been trying to 'sell' the idea of fully interactive content on PDAs and smartphones for 6 years - since I discovered the Flash 5 player for PocketPC. But there has been too much fragmentation across devices, device operating systems, service providers etc to make that truly possible. The promise now is that 'any' feature supported by the Flash or AIR player should be supported by any device that can have that player installed. Features that are unsupported, i.e. a video CODEC, or Sound or whatever should fail gracefully (sort of like CSS) but in a general sense the user experience should be good on any device.

It will take a little while before this shakes out properly, and I hope to see NONE of the fragmentation and hassles that Java prorammers have to deal with.

Anyway - I'm excited by this announcement.

SteveHoward999
05-07-2008, 06:37 PM
Apparently nobody but me cares :-)

This video from Kevin Lynch explains more about the project, and makes it plain the new players will be updatable

http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/developers/?devcon=f2

ionen
05-10-2008, 02:39 PM
This Adobe service seems to be similar to Windows Live for TV (previously beta, now missing in action from http://get.live.com/betas/), but with wider availability.
I'll keep an eye on it!

ionen
05-13-2008, 08:03 AM
...Windows Live for TV (previously beta, now missing in action from http://get.live.com/betas/)...

Yey, I'm quoting myself :D
So I've recently found that under the Activities tab in Windows Live Messenger there is an option called 'Messenger TV' that enables a similar use to what I remember the WL for TV had - watching videos with friends. There's only one catch (not that surprising), it has no love for Youtube or Vimeo. Only MSN Videos