The Adobe AIR Tour is coming to London tomorrow (I heard there's free beer..?) and I'll be taking part, hopefully meeting up with Mike, Andrew, Chris and a bunch of other lunatics. My mate Steve is coming along, but Simon unfortunately had to cancel at short notice.

If you are there then make sure to say hello - I'm the guy without a voice (recovering from a really bad man cold, as anyone who's spoken to me in the last few days can attest).

Here's a really good, long read - and this is one from the trenches.

On the same note, a project manager who I have worked closely with on many Flash projects emailed me the other day and said: 'We can move on with that Flash job now. I've just finished my first Silverlight project - it was hell'. I'll have to dig deeper and find out what happened.

What I distill from these people's experiences is something along the lines of 'Silverlight is potentially quite good, but it's not good yet'. At the same time I see many people on several mailing lists (some of them Microsoft employees) announcing Silverlight as the next best thing since sliced bread, but how many of those people have actually put in the time that Jesse has? Are those people fit to comment? Or can the success of a technology really be bought by throwing vast amounts of money at it? Would the Flash Platform be where it is now had it not been nurtured over time and grown organically? .NET I hear you say - I don't buy that argument. Yes it has been around for a while but never been leveraged in the form of a RIA platform. Silverlight is the new kid on the block, and it'll have to earn its respect. Pointing at the big cousin alone won't stick.

I'll give Silverlight a shot sometime, but not just yet, and not if it means booting up that Vista box again. Please don't make me do that.

A pretty cool lineup - well DJ Z-Trip was cool anyways, not sure what to expect from the Pussycat Dolls :-) Check it out right now for another 3 hours.
Operation Myspace, live from Kuwait. Live encoding in multiple bitrates (up to 1.3Mbps 30fps) in VP6 via Kulabyte. Delivery is as far as I know over Akamai.

I've just received the official line about this event:
On March 10, Myspace is hosting a live HD streaming Webcast, which will utilize Adobe Flash technology. "Operation MySpace" is a landmark event designed to support U.S. troops stationed in Kuwait and will be broadcast around the world. The free music and comedy event will include performances by the Pussycat Dolls, Jessica Simpson, Disturbed, Filter and DJ Z-Trip. Using the powerful streaming capabilities in Adobe Flash Media Server 3 coupled with the award-winning Adobe Flash Player runtime, U.S. troops, family, and friends can experience the webcast live over the Internet in full-screen HD. This webcast from Kuwait will demonstrate the future of video on the Web, delivering high definition video of the event at less than 1.5 megabits per second.

The webcast will start at 11a.m. PT/ 2 p.m. ET and can be viewed live at http://myspace.com/operationmyspace.

there's also a full press release about the event.

From Monday 25 February to Saturday 1 March, 24 of the world's best snowboarders and skiers will have free reign of the European Alps. They will be taking part in the Swatch O'Neill Big Mountain Pro, 8 days of all terrain action, in search of the most thrilling obstacles that nature has to offer. Freecaster.tv will be streaming Live coverage for 2 hours every day from 16:00 to 18:00 (CET).

Tune into Freecaster.tv to see if the Terje's Big Air record of 9.8 meters will be broken this weekend at The Oakley Arctic Challenge.
The Live stream on Freecaster.tv will begin at 18.30 CET on Thursday and 10.30 (CET) on Saturday so there's no excuse to miss this crucial event.

Watch it all on http://freecaster.com/1000009_1003849

The second Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament (organised by Sean McSharry) is taking place on Monday 25th February at the famous Loose Cannon poker club in Cannon Street EC4. The event is FREE and open to all professional Adobe software users. Adobe are taking care of the bar tab and providing some impressive prizes for everyone who makes it to the final table. Don't worry if you've never played poker before, there will be lots of novices and you all get 20 minutes of training before the event begins.
Invariably it's the beginners who usually do best, as was born out by the defending champion, Steve Riglesford, who will be there to see off all challengers, flaunting his winners bracelet no doubt. The event is next Monday and there are still some places left, so go to www.pokercoder.com and sign up quickly if you want to attend. You have to register at the site to get in on the night. You'll also get the opportunity to network with Adobe representatives and fellow industry experts (an invaluable career opportunity and a really great bunch of people).

I was just forwarded this link - and yes now I'm blushing a bit ;-) Granted, this puts a positive marketing spin on things but I totally agree that the stream looked great. I stand by my comments that it was the best live stream I've ever watched, and no I don't know what the exact resolutions were and to be honest I don't care that much. Adobe is right in this case, experience matters and this was a good one. I must be right because even my wife said so! Hopefully there will be more such events to come and we will try and push the envelope of what can be done with live Flash video.
Thanks to everyone involved.

...from one of Europe's biggest Skateboard and BMX contests. Freecaster.tv will be are streaming live in high quality Flash video using Kulabyte's upcoming two pass live encoder. Yes, two pass live...
Check out this page over the weekend. Sweet, this is my kind of event. Anyone remember the Muenster Monster Mastership of '89? Were you there?

UPDATE: the stream is now live and I'm able to offer you the feed live here. Check it out and make sure you go full screen! The quality is very good that it's hard to believe that this is a live stream! Bandwidth courtesy of Interoute, delivery courtesy of Wowza, player courtesy of me ;-)

FURTHER UPDATE: the live feed has been removed from this post as the event is now over.

For three days that is - I haven't sold out just yet :-) From January 30th to February 1st I will be helping out at the Adobe booth at the Broadcast Live & Video Forum at Earls Court in London. We'll be giving demos on FMS3 and AMP as well as some fully fledged presentations. If you're in the area then why not pop by and say hi - I'm the guy in the Adobe shirt. Entry to this techy show is a reasonable GBP 15 and if you register in advance it's completely free.

At MAX Europe in Barcelona I attended a session on Flash video in which Jens Loeffler of Adobe outlined the upcoming DRM features in Flash video. This was the first time I heard any technical details on how this DRM approach will work and what it can do. What follows is my approach at summarising what I gathered and a series of photos of all the DRM related slides that were shown.

As announced previously, Adobe is planning to offer two forms of digital rights management which they call content integrity (slide) and identity-based licensing (slide). In a nutshell the former means that a particular piece of content is only playable if it has not been altered, which is important if you as a content owner want to ensure for example that a pre-roll video ad is always part of the main content.

The Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is now open for registration (www.pokercoder.com). The event is completely FREE and will take place on the 1st November at 7pm at the Grosvenor Victoria casino in Warren Street.
Adobe are providing the food, drink and prizes. This event is open only to those who use Adobe products professionally and places are strictly limited, so register asap. Don't worry if you've never played before as the casino are laying on training for 20-30 minutes from the dealers at your table. Don't worry, there will be lots of beginners. For those of you who already play and want to improve your game, Andy Hood will be running a some slightly more advanced training during the same training time and you can ask him for advise and tips. Check out the site and if you have any further questions, contact the organiser at sean AT flashcoder.net.

Sorry for taking so long to post this but my presentation slides for Streaming Media Europe's 'Live Video in a Flash' workshop are now online.
The slides for the workshop are here (zipped PDF) and the slides for the 1 hour presentation are here (zipped PDF).
If you have attended any of the sessions and are interested in a particular sample application then please contact me and I will make every effort to share my code where possible.

I've just returned from Streaming Media Europe in London where I have hosted a workshop and separate presentation on Live video with Flash. Judging by the turnout and talks afterwards I think both sessions were well received.
Did you attend my workshop on Wednesday or session on Friday? What did you think of it? Any comments would be appreciated. I will post my slides and sample applications here sometime next week, I just need to get them organized and zipped up.

Dang, MXNA is being brought to its knees right now as everyone is refreshing the pages madly to gather news from MAX.
Here are a few nuggest of information I have been able to gather so far:
· General Session Notes (Google Doc)
· Peter deHann Keynote live blog
· Adobe Media Player on Labs
· flex 3 Beta 2 on Labs
· Spry 1.6 on Labs
· AIR Beta 2 on Labs
· Redesigned Adobe Devcenter

More to come.

There are some cool events coming up in the next few weeks which I am very excited to be able to attend. First up is Streaming Media Europe in London which runs from Thursday 4th to Friday 6th with pre-conference sessions on wednesday (that's two days from today). I'll be presenting a session on Live Flash Video on Friday and a 3 hour pre-conference workshop on Wednesday 3rd titled 'Live Video in a Flash'. I believe there may still be a few places available (what does this say about my popularity?) so get yourself booked in if you're interested in the subject of Flash based live video.
Streaming Media Europe is a fairly young event which - if you ask me - is a bonus as you really get to know the attendees. It's also interesting from a Flash developer's point of view because events such as this break the boundaries between Flash and video and it's not the usual Flash crowd which attends but people from other industries who are interested in Flash, and its video capabilities in particular. Adobe have a booth there and some folks from the FMS team will be attending (hello Jens!).

In mid October it's the big one: Adobe MAX Europe in Barcelona. Time has truly flown and I can't believe it's October already. If you are still considering whether or not to attend MAX or not then stop dithering now and grab yourself a ticket. This conference will be huge. I'm lucky enough to be presenting two sessions at MAX, one titled Flex Video Integration and one on Secure Content Delivery with FMS. Come and say hello if you see me. Until then - see you in Barcelona or London (or Flash on the Beach in Brighton ;-).

I've finally made it to IBC this year and it was even better than I expected. I'm hoping to post some pictures and information over the next few days (as time allows) but for now I recommend you watch some of the recorded sessions here. Kevin Towes' session on FMS3 is a must (note that I had to click the 'watch this session' button twice before it would play the correct session) in order to get some sneak peaks at the new features of FMS that are coming up. The session on Adobe Media Player by Mark Randall and Karl Miller is also recommended and very funny, too. Those guys have done this type of thing once or twice before I think.
If you are wondering about whether or not to attend IBC next year I say don't think twice, this event is tech and gadget heaven, and big gadgets at that. My legs still hurt and I think I only got to see about half of all exhibitors in two days, it's that huge. Plus Amsterdam isn't a bad location either (although I had stayed in the worst hotel ever but more on that later)!

You may have heard that this year Adobe is hosting a european version of the annual MAX conference in Europe, and Barcelona to be precise. It's fittingly named MAX Europe and yours truly is scheduled for two sessions where I will talk about Flex and Video integration as well as Secure Video Delivery with Flash Media Server. I feel very privileged to be part of a great lineup of speakers and I hope to see you there, it will be a blast.

The Verbier Festival takes place up to August 5th, with live sessions at 11 AM and 7 PM CEST every day. Every concerts will be available for on demand viewing up to August 31th.

The concerts will be filmed in high definition and will be accessible for free with a full screen option and high sound quality for listeners throughout the world.
The delivery for this event is handled by Internap.

The Verbier Festival.

Bored at work? Fancy watching some Golf? Now you can, courtesy of the Evian Masters 2007 being streamed live from Haute-Savoie in France.
The technical team behind this project is Paris based DBee and I had the pleasure of meeting some of the guys at my instructor exam at Adobe headquarters in London a couple of weeks ago. DBee is a company which has traditionally dealt with Windows and Real based streaming but who is transitioning towards live Flash video. A trend?

The technical details behind this event are as follows: streams are encoded with FME at 300kbps and sent to Akamai for delivery over their new Origin/Edge based FMS network. Broadcasts started this morning at 7:30AM Paris time and will run for 3 days. I had a quick peek and it played smoothly all the way.

Watch the stream live. (Windows Media also available, however I couldn't get that to work on my Mac ;)

The registration for Streaming Media Europe is now open and the provisional programme has also been released.

Streaming Media Europe, which takes place on October 4th and 5th 2007 in London, features over 50 international speakers focusing on both corporate and consumer business, technology and content issues involving online video in the enterprise, advertising, media and entertainment and broadcast markets.

I will be part of it again this year with a preconference workshop (October 3rd) on - what else - Flash video of course. This time though I will concentrate on live video, which has gained great traction in the last few months. I will also summarize the workshop in a 1 hour session on October 5th.

Remember: it's not just about streaming. Streaming Media Europe features a range of intensive conference sessions and workshops that showcase the best and the brightest minds in the online video and content industries.
See you there!

Last week I made my way down to London with my mate Steve to attend Adobe Live, a free two-day event with product demos, workshops, networking and discussions.
We only had time for the first day which was the Developer's day and Steve took lots of photos with his new Digital SLR. Here are some of them - I added some comments.

Are you interested in Streaming Media, based in or around London and available for a part time opportunity? Dan Rayburn, Conference Chairman of Streaming Media Europe, is looking for help with organizing the conference this year.
For full details please check his blog. Streaming Media Europe is a great conference with a brilliant bunch of people behind it and I am looking forward to attending again this year.
Get in touch with Dan right away if you are interested.

Ah yeah, and that's not all. Just spotted on Chafic's blog is the announcement that Kevin Lynch made at Engage which details a rough roadmap for Adobe product releases for 2007. Remember, Engage was an event that tried to determine where web technology is going next, and how Adobe contributions could help.
Amongst other things the second half of 2007 will see a new version of Flash Media Server as well as a new product which is a Flash stand alone player codename "Philo". I have no idea what this is or means but if it's a more heavy weight (in terms of filesize) player then the possibilities are truly stunning (note I'm speculating wildly, I honestly have no clue) as many toys could potentially be packed in there, ie video codecs, VoiP, the dreaded DRM, who knows what else.
Exciting times ahead (that's if it's not DRM ;-).
ZDNet has some info on Philo, but there it's described as an application, not a player. Who knows...

Yeah you heard me right, it's happening. John Davey, the organiser behind Flash on the Beach, announced yesterday at the London Flash Platform User Group that Flash on the Beach 2007 is happening and the date, if I remember correctly, is November 4th to November 7th 2007.
There are pre-conference workshops planned on the 4th November, one day tickets will be available as well as student discounts. There was also talk of a discount for those who have attended the 2006 event.
A few speakers were already mentioned including John Grden (does the man ever sleep), Andreas Odendaal and a bunch of other Rockstars whose names I have now forgotten - sorry, I didn't take notes.

See you at Flash On The Beack 2007.

Tink has again outdone himself and has organized two great speakers for this month's London Flash Platform User Group event.
First up is Carlos Ulloa who will cover Papervision3D, a high performance 3D engine for Flash 8 and Flash 9.
Mike 'Flashgen' Jones is up next for a lowdown on Flex 2 component development. Surely those a two sessions not to be missed. I personally will fly in from Brisbane to attend (ok not quite, but I'll be there if I can).
Remember, attending the event is as always FREE (but do bring money for booze).

Apologies if you attended yesterday's webcast and wanted to see my session on the fullscreen Flash fatures. Unfortunately the WIFI signal at the venue is so low (as in: off the scale) that when I moved my laptop, which ran the broadcast, 2 metres across the room to where the presentation screen was, the WIFI signal went down and didn't seem to reconnect again.
Other than that I think it went reasonably well for the main part, considering that these must be the worst possible conditions for running a live webcast:
- barely an internet connection (kinda important :)
- hardly any lighting
- a 2 year old laptop that seemed to overheat and shut down
- Flix8 Live which threw several errors and doesn't seem quite ready for real production use

So all this considered, I think it went well lol.

Thanks everyone who showed up, you made it worthwhile.

We're going to attempt another webcast this evening for the first session of the London Flash Platform Usergoup. The second session may not be broadcast as I myself have been drafted in to cover for Steven Webster who unfortunately couldn't make it and I'll have problems running a webcast and presenting at the same time LOL.
We'll be once again using Flix 8 Live to broadcast a (hopefully) 256kbps Flash video stream encoded in VP6. The WLAN signal at the location is very weak and so is the lighting so please don't expect too much :-)
To make up for it I have created a new front end for the webcast app in Flex - unfortunately though I had problems with Subversion which means the app we're using today is not the latest version and therefore nothing more than a text chat with a live video feed (the new one has a few more features). Check it out, Tink and myself may be testing now.

The webcast is tonight (thursday) at 19:00 GMT. You can access the old interface here, the new one here, both should show the same stream.

Note: the Flex app has got a few bugs, for example my username is hardcoded :-) but you can change that prior to login. Also if we need to restart the stream for any reason then the page may need to be refreshed. It should work without a refresh but something weird is going on... may be a problem with Flix, may be Flex...

This must be the first FMS event in a very long time - I can't remember the last one...
I'm very happy to see Flash Media Server receive some coverage and marketing exposure. This really is one of the main benefits of the Adobe-Macromedia takeover in my opinion: there's more money around to push great technologies that have long been due for some exposure. After all, Flash Video has just won an Emmy so it well deserves the spotlight. Ok, maybe a marketing seminar isn't exactly glamorous but it's a start.

So if you are in or around the Los Angeles area and have a bit of time to spare this coming Thursday (9th November, 10am to 1pm) then register now.

I am writing this post on the train on my way back from Streaming Media Europe in London (but I won't be posting it from here as neither is there WIFI on this train nor any affordable mobile internet access on my network).
Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay for the last day of the conference but I can sum up the time I spent there in one word: brilliant. Being a speaker has the benefit of free entry and accomodation but there's no doubt that any entrance fee would have been money well spent.
My own session (a 3 hour pre-conference workshop) titled 'A Guide to Flash Video' went very well. I hadn't hosted such a long session before but it's now clear (and probably was before I started actually) that three hours is a drop in the ocean when trying to cover a topic such as Flash Video in any great depth.

Just a quick reminder that I will be hosting a 3 hour workshop at Streaming Media Europe tomorrow, 11th October 2006 from 10am to 1pm. I will also be at the conference on Thursday 12th October so if you are there please feel free to say hello.
I believe that there are still places available for the workshop.