Bluestreak Adds Some Flash to TV and Device Menus
Bluestreak Technologies was busy last week at IBC (the International Broadcasting Convention) promoting next-generation menus for program selection on digital TVs, set top boxes, and mobile devices. The secret is in how Bluestreak brings the power of Adobe Flash to devices that don't support it.
DTV Gets Interactive
In its first announcement, Bluestreak told that it had successfully deployed its MachBlue platform on Mitsubishi digital TVs that began shipping in the second quarter of this year. MachBlue is the company's platform for creating Flash applications that let viewers interact with a variety of content types.
Bluestreak already had experience creating Flash-based experiences for cable set-top boxes for Time Warner and Videotron when Mitsubishi approached the company to create an interactive user interface for a line of TVs. Mitsubishi wanted a graphic, interactive way to help buyers program their new high-end TVs, and saw Bluestreak's menus as the answer. The menus are now available on all Mitsubishi TVs, including the DLP, LCD, and upcoming Laser series. This makes Bluestreak the first company delivering interactive Flash experiences on home theater products.
"Flash has become the de facto 2D (vector) standard for GUIs (as well asgames, and other content). This clearly shows Mitsubishi's plans for IPTV.Next we will look for whose Flash accelerator they choose—I'm betting itwill be Imagination technologies," says John Peddie, president of John Peddie Research.
Menus that Do More
Attracting greater attention, however, were Bluestreak's demos of 3D selection interfaces. These menus were also built with the company's MachBlue platform.
The 3D demos included a rotating cube menu, a pause on call time-shifting application for live mobile TV (it automatically pauses a program when a call is received), and an HD interface for IPTV set-top boxes.
Bluestreak was only a sampling of what designers could do with the MachBlue platform, stresses Dominique Jodoin, the company's CEO and president.
"People would be able to find new way to display menus, information related to other playing programs, different ways to have interactivity with the programs, such as buttons where you can vote on the program, and so on," Jodoin says.
The idea is that these menus will go beyond eye-candy and will present new and compelling ways to convey information. MachBlue uses real 3D, Jodoin adds, not 2D effects.
The MachBlue platform includes specifications from Flash 9 and publicly released parts of Flash 10. Bluestreak's own APIs let the software operate in environments such as mobile phones and set-top boxes. In high-end phones it uses OpenGL so that the Flash graphics can take advantage of the device's processing power.
"We're taking Flash specs and innovating around them. We've been doing this since 2002, so for us it's nothing new," says Jodoin.While there's no place online currently to experience the 3D demos, Jodoin says products made with MachBlue will enter the marketplace soon. Set-top boxes with it should be released in the first quarter of 2010 and wireless devices in the second quarter, he says.
"End users have had rich content on their computers for years, and now they want the same experience on whatever kind of device they're using," says Jodoin.