Adobe MAX 2009
It’s been one month since MAX 2009 has ended and it’s about time to write my view on the whole event. Three major themes seemed obvious to me: Flash everywhere, Internet video distribution and analytics.
Flash
Flash everywhere: a new, faster, more agile, less hog-ish Flash is coming. And it will run on all smartphones (except the iPhone), on netbooks, it’s going to be great. It’s a much needed improvement for Flash, after all the criticism it has drawn. You can say that all the Flash haters are just trolls looking to please the mighty Steve and his minions but in the end such a raging storm must have its reasons and a CPU stuck at 100% is surely one of them.
So if a faster and nimbler Flash will be out there then it’s great news for the developers. You basically write the core only once and then deploy with minimal effort everywhere. Right. I think we’ve heard that before, but none the less, it’s a step in the right direction. At least we’ll all see those YouTube videos.
Video
Another major topic was the internet video distribution and there were some great demos by the Flash Media Server team, by Akamai and by MLB.tv (Major League Baseball). Video distribution at 3 Mbps, very high quality, 4 streams in parallel (take that picture in picture), 20 angles per live event, seamless switching between bitrates when network congestions appear, mobile streaming…should I go on? Unfortunately this is very much US and UK only with the rest of the world still playing catch-up as far as I know. We’re still waiting for hulu over here in Europe and for epix (read about it) as well.
Analytics
The final theme was around analytics. The Adobe Omniture deal was a big part of it as well as the big Omniture booth. But in the end, I got the feeling that there’s an overwhelming amount of data out there (20 angles for one event, mobile distribution etc) and that you can’t keep track of it anymore. So you need to start analysing and segmenting and seeing which of all the tools you have actually makes more money for you. We’re still at the beginning and I feel we’re not getting the complete picture by far, but we’re slowy getting there.
Exciting times, I’m telling you. I for one am looking forward to be amazed.