ABC is streaming three seasons of Lost in HD (presumably with the new Flash Player)
ABC.Com has been offering full episodes of shows to watch over the web, but what’s new is their offering of Lost in HD 720p. Personally, I haven’t watched the show since Season 2, and it seems to have been getting a little long in the tooth with long drawn out plotlines traveling the road to Snoozeville. However, the fact that 720p is being broadcast over the Internet with such ease is pretty darn cool.
Since the site is Flash, I assume they’re using the new Flash HD streaming capabilities that Adobe released in early December for streaming the HD content. There’s a couple of HD demos of the new Flash Player showing off the new HD capabilities on the web, but ABC.Com is the first mainstream content provider I’ve seen to use the technology. And I gotta say, it works and looks spectacular.
They have a few 30 second commercial breaks (sponsored by LG), interspersed throughout the episode I watched.
The stream came down to me at 1388 kbp/s and it looked fantastic. I only have a 180 KB/s Internet connection and it didn’t stutter once upon playing, compared to when I last tried the NetFlix WatchNow streaming service in which I could only get the medium quality option because of my crippled Internet connection. Back with the ABC Video Player, there was some initial interlacing when the stream started playing and my initial reaction was “this isn’t HD”, but after about 20 seconds, probably when buffering caught up, it looked really, really good. Did I say how good this look? We’ve come a long ways since the days of Real Media over a 56.6K modem!
This is a huge step forward in content sharing. Companies are interested in fulfilling the niche market of letting people watch television on their own schedule. I can’t wait until some form of devices that sit on our television can play all this content like this. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD players….bah…just let me stream the content directly from a source. We know it’ll eventually get here.
To me, the DVR is a temporary hack. The future is going to be all about watching the shows/movies you want to watch, when you want to watch them. I’m not interested in maintaining my own media, media servers, remembering to get a season pass to a show, etc… I want everything to be onDemand. And with Flash player streaming HD content smoothly and a mainstream content provider offering up premium content, we’re well on our way. ABC’s putting LOST up on the web (obviously to promote the new season coming out) in HD is one little step closer to my media dreams.
Now the question is, when will the FLASH player be getting embedded into little media devices? Also, if anyone in the technical know knows the details going on behind the scenes with ABC and their HD streaming, feel free to comment on it. I haven’t really had any time to dig at any depth into how/what ABC is using for delivery of this HD content, I’m only assuming the new Flash “Moviestar” player.
Comments
Comment from Bob
Date: January 14, 2008, 7:12 pm
Not bad at all but I liked the picture quality a little better with the Move Networks player and the VP7 codec. Do you have any idea if this is H.264 or VP6-S?
Comment from taude
Date: January 14, 2008, 7:17 pm
Hi Bob, I’ve dug around a little bit further, ABC might be using MoveNetworks software. They could be using a custom version of it. So, the the question for me, anyway, would be what does MoveNetworks use in their software?
SOme quick googling of ABC Video player found this article which confirms that ABC is using Move Network’s software.
Comment from Bob
Date: January 14, 2008, 7:38 pm
Thanks for the quick response. I uninstalled the Move Networks player from my PC and the videos still play. It’s certainly seems to be Flash. I got better picture quality the second time around. So my only question left is it H.264 or VP6-S? Maybe someone will know.
Comment from admin
Date: January 14, 2008, 7:41 pm
Be sure to give it 15 or 20 seconds to fully ramp up the quality. It doesn’t really build a buffer in the traditional way. The first time I ran the video it was all grainy. But then I realized like in the same way an interlaced GIF or JPEG renders in a web browser, this video got better and sharper too…which I thought was really cool since I’ve never seen that before. I think it took me about 15 seconds for the image to get sharp, even though it was already playing from the get-go.
Comment from Joe
Date: January 21, 2008, 9:04 pm
ABC uses Move Networks for video delivery and rendering. Bit rates range from 180kbps to 2mbps and stage sizes up to 1280×720 depending on your PC’s (or Mac’s) ability to pull and render the bits. The client continually monitors bandwidth throughput and CPU and selects the correct profile for the best possible viewing experience. The degraded quality at the beginning is simply the client making its progression thru the profiles as it learns more about the bandwidth and CPU resources it has.
Comment from xplicxit702
Date: February 18, 2008, 6:03 pm
You can watch complete full episodes of Lost for free at http://loststream.com/
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Date: May 31, 2009, 4:56 pm
[...] Simplified Chaos ABC is streaming three seasons of Lost in HD Posted by root 41 minutes ago (http://www.simplifiedchaos.com) I can 39 t wait until some form of devices that sit on our television can play all this comment from joe date january 21 2008 9 04 pm abc uses move networks for video 2009 simplified chaos powered by wordpress log in Discuss | Bury | News | Simplified Chaos ABC is streaming three seasons of Lost in HD [...]
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