February 11, 2007
Adobe's Flash Video to Play on Mobile Phones, New Transcoding System to be Unveiled This Week at 3GSM in Barcelona
Bill Joll, On2 Technologies
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[Start of Audio]
It’s my understanding that about 80 percent of Adobe’s install base is using Flash 8 or 9 and we’re the video codec in that. So now if you translate that into the majority of the social networking sites, user generated sites, I’d extrapolate that 80 percent of these sites are encoding in Flash 8 or 9. And with that much content in Flash 8 or 9, people want to watch those on their mobile phones. We feel that we have the product now to allow content owners, service providers and consumers to be able to get access or deliver that content through the transcoder platform.
So the first thing I do is I go to the browser, fire it up and the video can be played back as low as 20 kilobits per second, which is a very, very low data rate, but yet it gives a good quality performance. And I’m gonna click on that just to show what that video looks like.
Well actually, there’s two pieces to the puzzle, right? There’s, what has Adobe Macromedia achieved? Adobe Macromedia, with their flash authoring tool, has actually made it very easy for people to make compelling video experiences. Then we came along to actually improve the video in the interactive experience and our compression technology actually gives you a video that you want to look at. I mean that’s the bottom line.
As you can see, it’s almost instantaneous.
So it makes it look good and it also makes it smaller so it’s quicker or –
Well, compression is always the idea of how can you keep the quality in low bit rate, low bandwidth. If you want higher frame rates, smoother video, then you may have more bandwidth to do that. Or conversely, we look at it from a compression perspective, which is people want this kind of smoothness, this kind of quality, but we only have this kind of bandwidth environment or this kind of processing environment. And how can we do that? And there’s a lot of science that goes behind that technology. We’ve been at it for 13 plus years.
Now, this video’s playing at about 20 kilobits per second. It’s about five or seven frames per second, which is very, very slow and a very low data rate, but yet the video quality is acceptable.
And now I can show another demo that’s at a higher data rate so this is 128 kilobits per second, about 15 frames per second, which traditionally is considered full motion video. And you’ll see a slight difference in the video quality because it’s at a higher data rate.
The benefit that we are bringing is you have so much content being created every day in Flash, people want access to that and that’s really where the killer app is.
This is Bill Joll of On2 Technologies on Beet.TV.
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