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By Brett Winterford
www.itnews.com.au
May 25, 2010 6:29 AM
Effort to port iView to iPad, mobile devices by end of year.
ABC executives have described Apple's decision to abandon Flash as "deeply
annoying", but nonetheless plan to re-engineer the television station's iView
service to build an app for the iPad, among other wireless devices.
Delivering a visionary speech on content in an NBN-enabled world at the CeBIT expo
yesterday, the broadcaster's manager of new services Chris Winter showcased several
ABC online initiatives - some of which were based on Adobe technologies.
Asked what he thought of Apple's decision to abandon Flash, Winter said the decision
was "deeply annoying".
"Broadly speaking, it's why putting [on-demand TV service] iView on the iPhone has
taken a little bit longer," he said.
The ABC's iView service was developed using Adobe's Flash tools, but the broadcaster
recently switched to H.264 as its video streaming format.
Arul Baskaran, acting head of multiplatform production at the broadcaster said that
ABC is also building feed-based applications and widgets that use H.264 video
streaming - "not just for Apple, but as part of our strategy on connected TV, set
top box and emerging platforms."
The broadcaster will also consider HTML5 for its rich online content "further down
the road", but is sticking with Adobe Flash for now.
Baskaran told iTnews the ABC would like to offer iView as a widget/application on a
range of mobile devices and internet-connected televisions by the end of the year.
"We'll also be working on an iPad implementation, and looking at mobile," he said,
the interface for which will be written in Objective-C rather than Flash, due to
Jobs' ban on Flash.
Baskaran said it was important to weigh up audience reach and development effort.
"We aim to be platform-agnostic so that we can play and integrate with a number of
services," he said.
"We also have to ask how much of an audience a given platform will reach, but
balance that with that part of our remit that says we should be at the cutting edge
of innovation."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/175652,abc-apple-flash-snub-deeply-annoying.aspx
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