Everyone from Steve Jobs to a member of the Mozilla team we spoke to at SXSW blames Adobe Flash for crashing their technology, and the lack of support for it on the iPhone OS — even for apps that began their lives as Adobe creations — has sparked controversy all over the web. Adobe even says Apple’s ban might actually “harm” its business.
But it’s too early to ring the death knell for Flash. Not only will Google Android smartphones and tablets run Flash, but an entirely new market for the web-centric technology is opening up in the old media of television — of all places.
The new $129 Popbox set-top box announced Thursday by Syabas Technology, makers of the beloved Popcorn Hour set-top boxes, is an app platform similar to the one on the iPhone OS, except that it’s designed for your HDTV — and that developers can easily port Flash apps to play on it.
At its launch, slated for the second quarter of this year, Syabas says its $129 Popbox will include apps from Channels.com (an aggregator of web-based television shows), FunSpot Games, Netflix, Photobucket (photo sharing), Revision3 (original video programming), Shoutcast internet radio and Twitter. At this stage, Syabas’ own developers are working on these apps, but after launch, the platform will open to whoever wants to build an app.
“This is a huge opportunity for the Flash development community to create popapps for the primary screen in the home,” said Popbox COO Alex Limberis. “The possibilities are endless and we can’t wait to see what the community comes up with.”
Syabas’ existing Popcorn Hour set-top boxes have an installed base of 50,000 — orders of magnitude less than Apple’s estimated 85-million-plus iPhone OS devices, between the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch — and also dwarfed by those provided by cable and satellite companies and Tivo. And indeed, in the decade or so I’ve been writing about boxes that promise “finally” to connect televisions to local computers and the internet, they remain the realm of early adopters.
That could change, as an increasing number of consumers look to ditch their monthly cable bills in favor of a mix of free online video, paid streaming from Amazon, Netflix and the like, and video downloaded from bit torrent to their computers and streamed over WiFi. Popbox leans on Flash apps to do that, Boxee supports Flash apps too, and we suspect set-top boxes like these will grow more popular, especially because their open APIs allow the development of non-video technologies such as Popbox’s Twitter interface and the Flash games that Boxee has planned.
“As we look out there at different content sources, the majority of them run in Flash, so it’s a key element of what makes Boxee successful,” said Boxee vice president of marketing Andrew Kippen, who confirmed that Boxee supports Flash apps. “We made sure to support Flash 10.1 … and even though we’re concentrating on video for the moment, a next step in our road map is definitely how we bring Flash games into the platform.”
Why would someone need a set-top box like this when televisions are adding internet connections? Television manufacturers are almost as excited about selling you “internet-ready” televisions as they are about selling you 3-D televisions, but the designation rings a bell. Remember when printer companies used to sell printers by labeling them as internet-ready, when really, any printer was capable of printing from the net?
The same goes for televisions. If anything is going to convince people to link their televisions to the internet, it will likely be set-top boxes designed with open architectures.
Flash could be coming to cable- and satellite-television set-top boxes too, as Google and Dish Network reportedly work on switching them over to the Flash-supporting Android operating system. But only a fool would expect a cable or satellite provider to offer a truly open internet-video experience. Standalone set-top boxes like Boxee and Popbox increasingly look like the way tech-savvy, thrifty consumers will deliver some or all of the video they watch on their televisions.
And they use Flash, even if Apple won’t.
