Slides from MAX 2010 Flash Platform on TV Talk

I’m way late to this party, but better late than never. In October 2010, I gave a talk at Adobe’s MAX conference introducing the Flash Platform for TV which is Flash Player for TV and AIR for TV. Here are my slides that give a good overview of the TV ecosystem as a whole and Adobe’s products for the segment. I might extract some of this information in the future for a blog post, but the whole deck is here for your to download.

You can also see the recording of the session at the MAX 2010 archives. Unfortunately there were some recording issues with the audio so part of the audio drops out in the first part of the talk, but it’s great since you get the visuals of the demos in the archive.

Overview of the TV Ecosystem and an Introduction Flash Player for TV and AIR for TV

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Track of the Week: Shot Yourself In The Foot Again by Skream & Example

This week’s track is Shot Yourself In The Foot Again by Skream & Example, a little dubstep ditty I found at the top of Hype Machine’s popular music list this week. While I generally don’t like the really grimey/dirty dubstep, this song is more dance with a little bit of dubstep thrown in. The solid four on the floor thumps through, layered under a melodic synth line. The track tells the story, one so typical yet always gets retold, of priorities between having fun and committing. Unlike most tracks of the week, I find this song a lot more illustrative with the music video. At the breaks the director does a rapid set of flash-cuts which advance the two sides of the story quickly. Great song, and perhaps one of the few “dubsteps” song that I want to listen to over and over again.

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Hi, I’m The Insides of Your TV

As televisions and TV service has gotten more and more sophisticated since the switch over to digital, the insides of your TV have gotten more and more complicated. What’s actually inside those TVs and how do they tick? Well, it’s both simple and complicated.

In the United States, almost all television is viewed by some pay-TV operator (think cable or satellite) and your TV acts as a display. There’s a ton of smarts and processing in the TV to smooth out the video, deblock compression artefacts, process the audio, etc. But the core part of the video experience is delivered by the cable box and delivered through the HDMI cable. Since the cable or satellite company own the entire pipe, they are normally built with custom made solutions by companies like NDS, OpenTV, and the like. A small percent watch broadcast TV in the United States (think bunny ears). In that case, specs made by the ATSC describe how the digital broadcast is supposed to work and the TV does all the heavy lifting.

In other markets, like in Europe, there is a lot of free-to-air broadcasts, and they’re specified by groups such as the Digital TV Group in the UK or DVB in Europe. Like ATSC in the US, these standards basically describe how broadcast digital TV is supposed to work, including things like the video codec, the audio codec, channel guides, any other data in the stream.

Most broadcast systems in the world currently use MPEG2 as the video codec, and can transmit in the high 10s of bandwidth per carrier, typically the US about 18 Mbps. Systems such as DVB-T2 are looking to move to H.264 as their video codec standard to more efficiently use the same amount of bandwidth.

But enough about codecs, how does it all work? It’s acutally pretty simple. Inside the TV (or cable box) there are a bunch of electronics and at the core of it is a system-on-chip or SoC. In the TV world, there are a few quite a few companies that make these SoC, such as Broadcom, MediaTek, STMicro, Trident, Intel, Zoran, MStar and probably more I can’t recall off the top of my head. These SoCs handle all the work required to make TV happen. They process the incoming stream, whether it’s a raw feed from a cable, satellite or broadcast TV feed, decrypt the streams if it’s protected, then decode the audio and video and sync it up, then sent it along, either to the display or on to the TV.

This picture is the inside of a flat planel TV. There are there major components shown here. On the far right is the logic board. On the logic board is the SoC, connectors to HDMI, cable and audio, memory chips, and a few other parts. In the middle is the power system, which powers the actual panel. On the far left is the speaker. The most impressive part of these systems is how slim hardware vendors have now managed to make everything while still retaining quality, especially around the audio from the speakers.

TVs (and set top boxes) are typically very very good at decoding and rendering video. They can typically decode Bluray quality in their sleep (to put it in context that’s roughly 39 Mbps of data), all the while doing all kinda of real time image and video processing to make it look even better. It’s really quite impressive how much data goes through a TV system in a second when rendering 1080p (1920w * 1080h * 24fps * 24bit color + 448kbps-ish of audio).

So that’s how your TV works! Easy, right?

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Track of the Week: Apply by Glasser

This week’s track is Apply by Glasser off of her album Ring. I’m still not 100% what this album is about, or what kind of music it is, but it’s (a) interesting to listen to, (b) folktronica, and (c) mind bending. Applying layers of tribal drums, beats and haunting vocals Apply is a track that deserves listening to.

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