Video: A Basketful of Live March Madness On the Nexus One
Every time I say I can live without Adobe Flash on my mobile phone, a video surfaces that causes me to reconsider my stance. This time it’s NewTeeVee with a glimpse of the NCAA March Madness tourney on a Google Nexus One over 3G. Using the Flash 10.1 beta, Adobe offered the demonstration along with confirmation that Flash 10.1 will officially hit Android devices within the next three months. Until then, I’m using these mobile methods to catch college basketball, which mostly pale in comparison. The live-stream doesn’t look flawless, but it’s not a slide-show either — not bad for a beta product over a mobile broadband connection right now.
The second half of 2010 is shaping up for quite a video showdown on mobile devices. By the end of this year, Microsoft’s Silverlight functionality arrives with Windows Phone 7 devices, although it’s won’t initially be supported in the browser — Silverlight apps like one for Netflix will leverage Microsoft’s video platform. Android and webOS devices will have Adobe’s Flash while Windows Mobile legacy devices aren’t getting it after all. And Apple will still hold the line and not allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Will it be Silverlight vs Flash vs HTML5 or will there be room for all three on mobile devices?
I think this is misleading. The experience he’s showing there is terrible – on the verge of unwatchable.
The real issue I have with the video is that the kind of video degradation I see is not due to bandwidth constraint, but due to the device dropping frames. Flash is a CPU hog, and it shows in this video.
I’ve used mobile Flash in many incarnations over the years. On Nokia S60′s, N800′s, WinMo, etc. Never have I seen Flash actually bring a true desktop experience to a mobile in a usable way.
The problem is the growth curves. Mobiles are becoming more and more powerful, but at the same time, the sophistication of desktop Flash experiences is growing just as much if not more rapidly. The lines have never intersected in a way that you can move content directly from desktop to mobile.
Mobiles can play low-res flash video now. And it’s perfectly feasible to make Flash players to do so on mobile devices. But the desktop video experiences have evolved with complex ads and other overlays, and higher-res video. So you always want a transcoded and mobile-optimized player to get a decent experience on a mobile device.
Given this, I take exception to the fact that they’re trying to promote a full desktop Flash experience on a phone. It’s just not there.
Good point on the maturity and complexity of desktop video. Based on that view, which video streaming platform do you see as the eventual victor on handsets?
I really like how Apple has implemented adaptive streaming for the iPhone. Have you seen the Akamai iPhone streaming showcase? It’s the best experience I’ve seen so far:
http://iphone.akamai.com/
Quicktime’s MP4 container handles the multi-bitrate thing well right now, and that combined with Akamai’s edge caching and bitrate selection, you can get HD when appropriate and degrade to non-HD seamlessly.
I think we need mobile browsers to treat video as a first class citizen. HTML5 will help with that, but the debate over codec is still on, so we’ll see if we get a standard there that can match the iPhone specific streaming able to be done now.
Indeed I have and I agree: http://jkontherun.com/2009/07/01/http-adaptive-streams-come-to-mobiles-before-desktops-looks-incredible/
I’d rather see a standards-based approach win out over a company-owned solution, but we’ll have to see how it all shakes out. And it probably won’t until next year at the earliest.
Ah cool. Great post.
I’m not as hung up on who wins as long as we have a good consistent consumer experience and the ability for publishers and users to be able to stream video to mobiles reliably.
Vimeo has been taking steps forward on iPhone too and I like the results. Haven’t seen a decent streaming experience for Android yet tho.
It’s exciting. I’m enjoying seeing this growth. I just think Adobe is promoting stuff that just kind of works now, but not well, and tries to push seamless desktop->mobile experiences when no matter what tech you use, you need to consider them separate.
Hey Rich, I think part of the quality problem you’re seeing is the Flip cam, it doesn’t like how close I get to the camera. The only big issue I ran into was when you switch between landscape mode and portrait you see a few dropped frames. Other than that it’s actually a pretty good experience. I didn’t get to test battery or test it on a full broadband connection, but it was definitely watchable.
I agree that ultimately, the best experience is going to be a mobile experience. And I hope that people creating Flash content for the big screen start to think about optimizations that take the mobile players into account. But I wanted to see how well this worked out of the box, and was surprised that it worked as well as it did. It’s not full desktop quality, but I thought it was a great start on a beta runtime and hopefully shows that we’re making some good progress with Flash.
Thanks for the comments all,
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
The main factor for seamless video playback on mobile devices is GPU decoding. In most cases the HW is limited to constrained baseline, which is also the case for the iPhone (meaning you can’t simply port your desktop web videos to the iPhone and expect them to play with 30 fps). FP 10.1 will support GPU decoding: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/mobile_demos_fp10.1.html – Tinic Uro’s section.
FP 10.1 will also have dynamic streaming support (a feature since FP 10.0), meaning the stream can dynamically adjust to the quality of your 3G connection.