iPad - Dead End for Flash?

[Update: It's getting ugly, as an Adobe rep responds.]

Between the launch of the iPad, on April 3, and the introduction of Apple's iPhone software version 4, on April 8, a significant amount of buzz was generated about CS5 Flash Professional's role in the iPad ecosystem.

The ability for Flash Pro to generate iPhone "packages" which allow some Flash content to play on the iPhone was first highlighted in October at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles.

I wrote about this "workaround" at the time, but interest in this topic was fairly low - until the iPad was announced without Flash support.

Between the sans-Flash iPad and the ongoing HTML5 video tag discussion, Apple continued to blow on the embers of its HTML5-CSS-JavaScript preference for iPad and iPhone delivery as the iPad launch date approached.

Based on the hype surrounding this "working around the web" from a Flash-iPad integration standpoint,  I wrote another article, positing on how Adobe could make Flash Pro relevant to the larger HTML5 development audience.

This week, the embers being fanned by Apple burst into a full-blown firefight. Apple's iPhone software version 4 has a modified licensing agreement, that states in part:

"Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs."

In other words, Apple's saying it's not how an iPad or iPhone package is compiled but also how it's written. Apple adds an example in its licensing agreement, directly following the portion noted above.

"(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."

Jon Gruber at DaringFireball picked up on this with the title: iPhone Agreement Bans Flash Compiler that lists out a few integrated development environments (IDEs) that may cross the line Apple has drawn in the sand, but he saves the bulk of his blog post for the implications to Adobe:

"Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is this close to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash."

Going to be an interesting week at NAB, with the roll-out of CS5, discussion of the iPad's personal media consumption coup and the clash of the tech titans that is now beyond its flashpoint.

Update: AppleInsider notes that the issue here may be pre-emptive, since it only relates to iPhone software version 4.0, which will ship later this year, and that it also may be intended to address multi-tasking (although combining pre-emptive and multi-tasking in this case would be a misnomer). 

DVR usage continues to climb

A week ago, I wrote an article conjecturing that online video usage drives on-demand DVR usage. Now, according to a Nielsen "Three Screen Report" it does appear that online video growth and DVR usage are tied together:

"DVR and Online Video continue to show solid growth – up 21.1% and 34.9% respectively in time spent from Third Quarter 2008"

Thanks to @AndyBeach for pointing this one out.

Metadata: Certainly Not Boring

Especially in this interview that Peter Cervieri recorded at last week's Streaming Media West 2009 show.

Peter's interviews for his ScribeMedia.org often focuses on topics that are both timely and somewhat controversial, but metadata often doesn't fit in the latter category, unless you count Peter's triple-X rated title for the interview.

While my slightly-pseudo-Southern accent always reminds me that I talk a bit slower now than I did when I lived in my native New York, Peter did a good job of steering the conversation to cover many of the points from my recent metadata article: Metadata: What You Need to Know (And Why You Need to Know It)

Running time for the interview is 12:29

Perspective: Blame it on video

"Internet traffic is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent. Video is the driver. Make no question about that."

Robert Pepper, Cisco
Internet Governance Forum conference

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.11b0df967c4c85298aa30205bd42846a.01&show_article=1



iPhoned

The Third Wave?

I'm really starting to find patterns in the technology plays of the various Media and Entertainment (M&E) groups, aligning core streaming delivery of "traditional" CDNs,mobile and telecoms providers against those of traditional broadcast, cable and satellite.

Twice before I've seen reckless attempts at a land-grab. In 97-99, everyone claimed, but no one could do, full-screen (or even consistent quarter-screen) streaming to the desktop. Then, in the 2003-05 timeframe, a land grab was attempted based on technologies that were supposed to work in 97-99 began in earnest after the coders got to go home during the bust cycle of 2000-2003 and really do the coding.

This one's different, and I think the analogy of the wild west is somewhat spot on: if the first two land grabs were earlier speculators and later  homesteaders,  eking out a living under difficult - and sometimes deadly -  circumstances, this new land grab is about the army marching in full-force to subjugate the natives so that the army's settlers can live within newly defined and expanded boundaries.

Like the battles in California or in Texas, this land grab is not about just one army, but multiple armies clashing for the same land. In other words, this land grab is systematic, purposeful and very process oriented. Whether you call it manifest destiny or subjugation (neither of which I use lightly, given my partial American Indian heritage), the end game of this land grab is establishing a presence that spans decades, not year.

And the natives come out on the bad end of the deal, as do many of the speculators and some of the homesteaders. Even a few settlers die in the process.

I see all four of these groups, along with the armies they represent, lining up in formation: starting with the telecoms (remember the article I did a few months back welcoming the big boys?) and then moving into the traditional broadcaster and now the cable providers, these armies have labs to manufacture the stockpiles they need and smoke screens / diversions to use in the meantime.

It'll be quite interesting to see if any of the traditional streaming encoder box companies make it over into these bigger markets, because I'm seeing more and more products based around H.264 and other standards at shows like Supercomm, from companies with no tie to the "streaming industry" as we know it.

A few articles I've written in the past few weeks provide an inkling of where the next few battles may occur:

Cable

Consumer electronics

Mobile Broadcasting

[Update: in early December, I wrote about a battle between two of these armies here.]

Perspective: Addressing Net Neutrality, Bit by Bit

In a phone interview today for a streamingmedia.com news article, the topic of balancing network neutrality and deep packet inspection (DPI) was broached by Prabakar Sundarrajan, CTO and co-founder of Ankeena Networks (formerly Nokeena Networks).

In announcing a partnership with Juniper Networks for Ankeena's video traffic shaping product, Media Flow Director, the company acknowledges that a partnership with a "big iron" company puts the Ankeena solution at the heart of the network neutrality debate.

In a nutshell, network neutrality, as defined by the FCC's recent policy making decision, seeks to limit what service providers would charge content owners and content viewers for delivering "non-traditional" content such as video and audio.

The intent of network neutrality, then, is to keep the network delivery charges neutral - or blind - to the type of content being delivered. In order for network providers to effectively optimize content that is time-sensitive, however, an optimization with is critical to all video and audio content tbeing delivered in real-time as a stream, it some level of packet inspection and packet shaping is required.

Otherwise, all delivery will still be the mediocre "best effort" that is currently synonymous with jerky, underpowered streaming media.


"Our solutions stay well away from the 'clear bright line' of both network neutrality and user privacy boundaries," said Sundarrajan, "while also addressing the needs of service providers."

How Ankeena can accomplish this, according to Sundarrajan, is via a three-fold approach.

"One way is to offer 'opt in' solutions for ISPs to, in turn, offer to their content owners who want to guarantee they reach customers on a particular ISP," said Sundarrajan. "This solution approach offers a uniform priority transport of packets, while a secondary value-added service - such as our AssureRate service - can also be used by content viewers or content owners."

"A third way," said Sundarrajan, "is for service provider to provide content delivery network (CDN) solutions from their own networks, where they charge the content provider to distribute content on the ISP's network."

This approach, where ISPs become CDNs, has been addressed by JetStream with its VDOx CDN-in-a-box solution for ISPs, but Ankeena's Media Flow Director solution also can work for wireless providers who need to deal with limited spectrum.

"As wireless service providers face limited spectrum and growing demands for video content," said Sundarrajan, "they will look for solutions that provide a way to bandwidth constraints."

Harking back to the example of the Terrayon Cherry Pruner, which was used by cable operators to dynamically limit the quality of particular video channels, Sundarrajan says a similar solution would be beneficial to the wireless service providers.

"Why Terrayon used its technology to allow a single channel's video quality to be lowered, as a way to charge a premium for quality," said Sundarrajan, "I like to think our solution will be more egalitarian, dynamically limiting the bandwidth for every user at key events, such as breaking news, rather than blocking mobile customers from seeing the video or attaching to the mobile network tower at all."

 The company has large trials ongoing with 12 potential customers, including telcos, cable MSOs and wireless providers. Ankeena also parters with Citrix on the NetScaler VPX load balancer, and NetApp.

The company says it will be announcing additional features and product enhancements around the time of Streaming Media West, which will be held in San Jose from November 17-19, 2009.

Additional information about Ankeena can be heard as part of a Streaming Media podcast from June 15, 2009.

Perspective: ASTC Mobile DTV standard = CDN disruptor?

[Update: To read a bit more perspective on this, here's an article I wrote for StreamingMedia.com a few minutes ago]

Returning to the US from StreamingMedia Europe, where I moderated the show's final panel with CDNs discussing HD and scalability, I'm spending the day catching up on news. The most important news I've read today may have a bit of an impact on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) space:

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) announced the final tally in member voting for the A/153 Mobile Digital Television (DTV) standard has passed with "overwhelming support" on its first vote.

"This milestone ushers in the new era of digital television broadcasting," said Paul Karpowicz, NAB Television Board Chairman and President of Meredith Broadcast Group, as part of the ATSC press release. "This gives local TV stations and networks new opportunities to reach viewers on the go. This will introduce the power of local broadcasting to a new generation of viewers and provide all-important emergency alert, local news and other programming to consumers across the nation."

The other programming mentioned in the above quote, in my opinion, may lead to a bit of left-field competition between the broadcasters and the CDNs, especially in dense-population markets beyond the US broadcast market.

Over the last two decades, living between the worlds of broadcasting, motion picture, the telcos and streaming, I've learned to track these standards decisions to gauge the true sense of where one industry may overlap another.

Here's one tell about the potential disruptor that this standard allows: it's using the same H.264 and AAC compressions across an IP network, something the Chairman of the ATSC alludes to in his comments.

"The ATSC Mobile DTV standard is flexible and robust, enabling a range of services business models that create new opportunities for broadcasters, device makers and consumers," said ATSC Chairman Glenn Reitmeier. "It is particularly noteworthy that ATSC Mobile utilizes Internet Protocol (IP), which will enable broadcast services to be easily integrated with wireless broadband consumer devices and applications, further reinforcing the significant role of terrestrial television broadcasting in the media landscape for decades to come."

In other words, ATSC gets to put a multicast receiver on a chip and deliver via IP, with enough bandwidth overhead to also do on-demand and progressive download, at least according to the standard draft announced on September 10, 2009, the same date as the IBC international broadcasting show.

 This standard may make for some strange alliances between CDNs, wireless providers and others, since this "over-the-air-broadcast" standard can be used to deliver not just live content to massive audiences in the home, in the form of other non-TV devices, but  also to deliver on-demand or progressive download content to mobile and handheld devices that may not then need a service agreement with the wireless service provider.

In other words, expect a mixing up of A/153 and DVB and CDN and three-letter broadcasters, the latter of whom had been written off for dead but not have a very decent overlay network to fill in (or supersede) the gaps in wireless coverage.

Workflow: Avatar, New Cameron Movie

Jon Landau shows off Avatar's Adobe Heritage

Jon Landau, producer from Lightstorm Entertainment, arrived today at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, to talk about the December 18, 2009, release of the 3D movie Avatar.

"We look at 3D as a window in to a world, not a way to make things pop off the screen," said Landau, adding the movie is not about Earth, even though it starts there before movie to the (pun-intended) planet Pandora. "We've wanted to do Avatar from way back at the time we did Titanic but the technology wasn't ready to be the enabler."

Landau said the avatars of the movie are dormant hybrid bodies that contain parts of both human and Pandoran bio-mass, sitting in stasis until a medical procedure moves consciousness in to the avatar from a human. The key hero (or anti-hero, depending on your political view of corporations and mechanized armies) is a wounded Army veteran whose twin brother is set to go to to Pandora to be linked with an avatar, before meeting an untimely death.

While the concept is far-fetched, the never-before-seen clips shown at Adobe MAX bring both the movie concept - and the tools used - in to a whole new light.

Landau talked about how Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects were key to various steps in the workflow.

"This is really about pulling Adobe's tools in to our workflow," said Landau. "There are certain software tools that let you do your job, there are other tools that allow you to do your job better."

Landau provided several examples, including one about the use of After Effects for compositing on the set and off the set.

"We used After Effects, with real-time composting, immediately on the set to show Jim," Landau said, referring to James Cameron, who directed both Titanic and the new Avatar. "WETA would interpret a wide-angle video shot of the actor's faces on frame-by-frame basis, to create Kabuki masks that pasted a 'mask' of the video image on to the CG character."

Workflow SNAFU - Akamai HD Network

[Updates (4): first HD, then "HD quality" and then silence. The stages of grief (denial, anger, etc) were all at play, but we made it to resolution and acceptance thanks to a key player within Akamai and a dedicated third-party vendor. Details below the original post. Issue resolved.]

For such a simple press conference, there certainly are a number of unanswered questions.  I like reporting the news, but every so often a claim is made ("first ever, only, etc") that has to be challenged.

An article I wrote on Tuesday, September 29, for StreamingMedia.com includes a link to an on-demand version of an Akamai press conference that had been streamed live that day (the on-demand version had a much cleaner playback quality than the actual live playback, which can be seen in the screenshot posted here).

Akamai was announcing their Akamai HD Network, hosted by Paul Sagan, CEO, and Tom Leighton, Co-founder and Chief Scientist. I have nothing against Akamai in particular, but unfortunately some of the claims made can't be substantiated.

One in particular struck me as key to the whole press conference. Leighton claimed (from 10 minutes 35 seconds to 10 minutes 58 seconds in the on-demand version)

 "Today there's [sic] 50 million homes that have connected gaming consoles - or other devices - that capable of displaying HD video, of getting it and displaying it into the home. Also, there's [sic] 45 million iPhones out there today capable of displaying HD video."

Let's take a look at the facts:

a). No one else has ever claimed that the 1st gen iPhone or even the iPhone 3G is capable of HD playback, which is the only way to get to the 45 million iPhone number.

b) Even the claims that the iPhone 3GS is capable of displaying HD content are conjecture, as Apple does not allow HD playback on the iPhone 3GS (even 480p content can't be played back).

c) While everyone is doing "higher definition" for live streams to desktop Flash and Silverlight players, many are doing HTTP streams, and a few are doing true HD (480, 720, 1080i/p) to these same players, there are a limited number of companies doing true HD live streams via HTTP, which is where Akamai wants to tell its story. None are doing it to the iPhone, however.

The reason I say it is key to the whole press conference is this: if all Akamai is claiming is "higher definition" as its term for HD, there's no story here, since others are doing it. If they're claiming HD for the iPhone, there's a story here but not one they can support.

When I heard that claim about the 45 million HD-capable iPhones, I immediately posted a question on the webcast, which was not read during the live event; I've also written twice to the PR contact, who was helpful with a question about one of the speaker's names, but has also been silent on the misstatement by Leighton.

Oh, and I can't even get the on-demand version of the press conference to play on my iPhone 3GS, as the debugger tags a ton of issues with the iphone.akamai.com page in Safari, although I was able to get it to play on another iPhone 3GS.

[Update, Sep 30, 2pm Eastern: Akamai's press contact has sent a copy of a document called "Akamai HD for iPhone Encoding Best Practices" that states, on page 5, the best practice is to encode at  a maximum size of 400x224 and a maximum bit rate of 864 kbps. Which one of these settings qualifies as HD content? You're right if you answered "none of them" as content encoded at this rate / size would be considered unacceptable on the desktop, and further undermines Akamai's claim of its HD network providing content owners with the ability to encode once and play out to multiple platforms / players]

[Update 2, Sep 30, 5pm Eastern: Akamai is now claiming that their clients send HD 'quality' to the iPhone, with the 'quality' being, well, the qualifier. Akamai has promised to send a direct link to an HD stream, but as of yet they have not been able to produce one. Did some more digging on Mr. Leighton's quoted 45 million iPhones and I now can say with certainty that number is also wrong; the iPhone 3GS is the only one capable of above standard-definition playback, and that feature is not even supported by Apple (see main post). There are less than 5 million of these 3GS units in the market, so Mr. Leighton is off by 40 million units. Another data point: the total number of all iPhone sold to date, as of September 30, 2009, according to consensus is less than 33 million, which means more than 85% of all iPhones are either 3G or first generation, which aren't capable of even playing standard-defiinition content at 640x480, let alone aspiring to play HD content at the lowest HD standard of 480p  that the 3GS might be able to play one day if Apple allows it (which they currently do not).]

[Update 3, Sep 30, 8pm Eastern: Akamai is now claiming that Tom Leighton meant to include all the iPod touch units when he said 45 million iPhones could play HD content. I was being generous, giving Akamai the benefit of the doubt about the 5 million iPhone 3GS units in the main blog post. I should have said it more plainly: exactly ZERO iPhone or iPod units on the market today are capable of displaying HD content. Akamai then changed course and claimed that its streamed content is considered HD when it starts from an HD source!  

I've heard this before: I did a previous article interview where the CDN client told me on the call they were streaming in HD; when I questioned that, the CDN client said "well, we're editing in HD on Final Cut" at which point the CDN representative interrupted and clarified. Like Akamai, they were starting with an HD source, and were claiming HD delivery . Like Akamai, they were streaming to an iPhone. Unlike Akamai, they admitted, when asked about the claim, that interviewee had misspoken. End of story, no mention in the article, other than to say it was edited in HD, but delivered in something lower than HD.

Akamai, on the other hand, says that as long as it's above 700 kbps and starts as an HD source, it can be considered HD. So the house of cards of the iPhone claims in the rollout of the Akamai HD Network rests on HD 'quality' that's below that of today's average standard-definition stream.

To make sure I'd not been projecting on to yesterday's webcast press call a minutia about the HD-capable iPhones, I listened again to Paul Sagan's introduction to the whole webcast. He stated in his prepared remarks: "The era of HD broadband is here. Producers and distributors are starting to offer the highest quality video to their audiences over the Internet. Internet video  that matches the television quality consumers are used to watching in their living rooms."

It certainly sounds good, much better than "We take an HD stream and compress the bejesus out of it, and deliver it to you at lower quality than the old standard-definition television that became obsolete earlier this year."]

[Update 4, Oct 16, 2pm Greenwich (London): Akamai's Suzanne Johnson, who will be appearing on my panel at Streaming Media Europe 2009 later today, has confirmed that a more accurate version of Tom Leighton's "45 million iPhones capable of playing HD content" statement should have been stated as this:

"By year's end, as part of the Akamai HD Network, up to 45 million iPhones and iPod touches will be capable of displaying high-quality video encoded from HD source content."

She also stated that Akamai understand that "the iPhone does not display true HD by definition but can offer consumers an HD-like high quality video experience that complements what they get on TV."

Issue resolved.]

Site is up

Still having an issue with the workflow of images between applications, mainly the desktop app and the online blogging site, but the issue has been identified and a workaround is in place. Having said that, there's no reason not to launch the site itself, in rudimentary form; please check out www.workflowed.com