Streaming Media East Interviews: Kevin Towes on Flash Player 10

This rounds out a week of coverage on Streaming Media East. Many news stories have been posted and the videos from the conference sessions are starting to be available. Andy Plesser of Beet.TV was on the conference floor doing a live 2-hour broadcast that featured a number of shakers and movers in the online video publishing industry.

Kevin Towes from Adobe was on hand to discuss the latest release of Flash Player 10 of which Hank Williams of Why Does Everything Suck.com says will change the economics of internet in his post Adobe Introduces P2P Flash Player, Kills CDNs.


About this video, Williams says, "While Andy interprets Kevin's answer as being a refutation of what I said, it is clearly not. Kevin actually doesn't give a direct answer. He says "Hank makes some gross assumptions in all his diligence, its sort of interesting. But what we announced is something called RTMFP." But what he does not say is, "you will not be able to make a p2p network with Flash." Also, neither has the Flash Player Product Manager Justin Everett-Church been categorical about it here or here." - Hank Williams, Why does everything suck? May 21, 2008

Hank Williams has several follow up posts:

• Flash 10 p2p and CDNs – Deeper Analysis
• Flash Product Mgr. Weighs In RE: Flash 10 And CDNs...
• Adobe Refuses To Say I'm Wrong.

Andy Plesser also recommended this related post P2P in Flash 10 Beta — the Questions Facing a YouTube, Skype, and BitTorrent Killer by Adam Fisk as well as this one Flash P2P: Now That’s Disruptive by Om Malik.

UPDATE: You can also Kevin Towes' blog Flash Media here.
UPDATE 2: Another good related post: Adobe Flash Player Now With Built-In Peer To Peer Capabilities | Flash 10 Has Arrived » Web TV Wire

Beet.TV: More on H.264 with Adobe's Kevin Towes

Andy Plesser posted this follow up interview with Kevin Towes from Adobe who goes into more detail about H.264 and the difference between high quality and high definition video. Towes describes container formats like .flv, .rm and .wmv as "end of the line" formats because that's all you can use them for since they are encoded to their proprietary formats. H.264 is more of a universal format that can delivered in both Quicktime and Flash formats which offers a greater ROI on your transcoding.

How do you deliver a HD experience through broadband? 1080p demands 15 Mbps and the web can't sustain that level of streaming. Towes says that we need to develop a "Web HD Concept" that can emulate a HD viewing experience but not deliver a true HD signal. You could have widescreen video, a certain frame size with a variable bit rate to achieve high quality with H.264.




The fact is that H.264 video looks great, it's scalable, standards based and can easily be delivered in a variety of formats. It's been several years in the making to reach its current state of adoption and could be widespread throughout the online video ecosystem by the end of the year. From digital device, to digital television and Blu-Ray disc you'll start seeing it more and more.

Kevin Towes' interview continues as he describes that file size is based on frame size, frame rate and but rate and how it can be estimated.




- Videos courtesy of Beet.TV

Beet.TV on The Rise of H.264 and High Quality Online Video

Online video quality is on the rise this year now that Flash Player supports playback of H.264. Adobe announced this last December with it's release of Flash Player 9 and a growing number of video distribution platforms now offer high quality and high definition H.264 encoded video.

Andy Plesser has been using H.264 and he's seen a dramatic increase in the quality of his videos on Beet.TV and Blip.TV. In his recent post, Adobe's New Flash Codec is "Everyman's HD Platform"....has Improved Beet Stream on YouTube and Blip, he said, "We get a lot of compliments about the quality of our video. Using H.264 has been key to the improved quality... I have come to think of H.264 as a kind of everyman's HD video production and distribution platform."

Plesser described the video workflow as only a few step process (1) shoot the video (2) edit video with Apple's Final Cut Pro 6 (3) export H.264 encoded .mov file. For producers and editors this really streamlines the process since you don't have to render a file that would then need to be imported into a stand alone compression program. He included this video of a conversation he had with Kevin Towes Adobe's Technical Product manager for Flash Media Server (FMS) who as Plesser says, "gives an overview of the evolution of the Adobe Flash Player and the various codecs that have been used over the years. He explains the significance of the introduction of H.264."




Towes was also interviewed by David Berlind, formerly of ZDNet, in a blog post titled, Between H.264 & 90% price drop, will Adobe’s new media servers mean more YouTubes? The post dates back to December 2007 and includes an mp3 file of the interview.