Flash and SEO made a lot easier
July 1st, 2008 09:07
Adobe has provided search engines with a customized Flash player that can interpret the various flash files that are published all over the internet. Making these sites “readable” for search engines was always very difficult. A lot of web developers asked for workarounds to let their Flash content to be indexed by search engines.
“Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology….” Google has posted an FAQ about this topic.
Read more about it in the Adobe press release.
Tags: flash, googleBBC launches iPlayer 2.0 using Flash (Video)
June 27th, 2008 12:06This week the BBC launched it’s new iPlayer . The video shows the features of this very nice build Flash based player. Features in includes a content catalog, channel catalog, references to similar shows and download-to-play.
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The full press release can be found on the BBC website.
Supply and Demand - Video content on the web
June 24th, 2008 19:06With the recent events of the Euro Soccer Championship, the “Tour de France” coming up and after that the Olympics, a lot of discussions (or here) are taking place in the Netherlands about online video distribution. The most recent discussion included KPN (the provider I am using) limiting the amount of “streams” that could be consumed by the users in it’s network. At home I am using a ADSL connection which has been sliced (probably 1/25 but could also be 1/60); normally this would be fine, but for the future, this could be troublesome.
The amount of content each individual user can (or wants) to consume will increase in the (near) future. In the past, the web consisted of text and images; in the past years, YouTube and other video sharing sides have exploded and publishing video on the web hasn’t been as easy as it is now (and will even be easier in future). The demand for higher quality adds a new dimension to the amount of data to be consumed. “High Definition” is the keyword you can find in every TV / Camera store and “High Definition” is what consumers want to see.
Currently the OnDemand and Live streams on the web are seldom in true HD, but this will change very rapidly. How are the IP networks of providers going to react? I think limiting access (either through bandwidth caps or limited amount of connections) is a bad thing.
An alternative way of distribution would be to use the “peer to peer” model. Joost is currently using. But Joost is also running into discussions with various providers; The “Asymmetric” approach limits bandwidth of the upstream connection. There are cases where providers block or throttle these kind of connections.
In the discussion around the various articles IPv6 Multicast and DVB-T are mentioned as alternatives to video distribution on the web. I think video on the web can add much more iinteractivity, for example in Flash you can add overlays, interact with other content and make video truely interactive. This is really the power of video combined with the power of the web.
In my opinion the demand of video (numbers of video and bitrate of video) on the web will hugely increase. Providers really need to catch up here and think of new ideas to bridge this gap.
P.S. This discussion is not only taking place in the Netherlands. The BBC is working on it’s OnDemand player (the iPlayer) and the amount of traffic is also causing discussions (article with statistics) in the UK.
Paris CDG II
June 24th, 2008 16:06
Switchboard - Drive Creative Suite with AIR
June 20th, 2008 22:06
At the beginning of this year Adobe released Adobe AIR - creating desktop applications with the Creative Suite tools and/or Flex Builder. During various visits with customer, I received questions if AIR could drive the Creative Suite applications….
Now you can with SwitchBoard.
“SwitchBoard brings together the power of the automation in the Creative Suite applications with the potential for third parties to extend the creative process with new applications produced using AIR. The result is an extensible, powerful, cross-platform environment that can quickly adapt to today’s rapidly changing creative workflows. “
