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Pushbutton’s award-winning ‘Time Capsules’ application could revolutionise viewer consumption of the World Cup in 2014 when IPTV-based television services are more widespread than at present.
Managing Director of Pushbutton, Paula Byrne, said “Time Capsules is the dream application for the World Cup. When video content is time-based and highly scheduled the Time Capsules engine really comes into its own, and we are very excited about honing the offering in time for Brazil 2014.”
The ‘Time Capsules’ app gives viewers a highly efficient and engaging tool for viewing time-based video content. It works particularly well when the viewer is in ‘information finding’ or ‘interactive mode’ – for example when catching up on goals, results, and activities in groups other than the primary group they are following.
Pushbutton’s ‘Time Capsules’ application has been designed to runs on the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. It was the runner up application in Microsoft’s global competition to find a top class application for Mediaroom.
See it here
Pushbutton has won an opportunity to showcase its best work at a BBC Online Expo to take place in London later this month. The company beat seventy other companies, to win one of the prized slots at the expo.
The BBC invited new media companies to pitch for the 30 slots at the prestigious event by submitting examples of recent projects, and by completing a written application.
The event will be attended by Pushbutton’s Director of Interactive Development, James Cumberbatch and by our Commercial Director, James Penfold.
Pushbutton are one of five finalists in Deustche Telekom’s Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV competition. The prize will go to the IPTV agency who designs and develops the best application to run on Deutsche Telekom’s Mediaroom platform.
The winning entry will be announced at CeBIT in March, where the winner will receive a cash prize and be awarded a contract with Deutsche Telekom to develop and deliver the app.
James Cumberbatch, Director of Interactive Development, said “I’m really excited by this. I can’t say anything about the nature of our entry, apart from the fact that it leverages all of our TV technology knowledge and thinking to boost the viewer experience in a unique way.”
The German telco now has 885,000 subscribers to its IPTV service, which is based on the Microsoft Mediaroom platform.
Pushbutton is an expert in the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV solution, having recently been awared second prize in a global competition, sponsored by Microsoft, to design and build an IPTV app for Mediaroom.
Our Mediaroom expertise has been building over the last few years, and the recognition for our ‘Time Capsules’ concept (it won second prize in a world wide competition organised by Microsoft) felt like a strong endorsement for our progress with the leading IPTV platform.
The Microsoft Mediaroom Conference held in San Jose in October, showed the investment that big companies are making in the technology. This will be a key driver of the next phase in interactive TV.
The sessions offered some good development insights. I was particularly impressed with the new “Physics” controls. The speed bump was really noticeable and I think that with this kind of polish, it will take the platform to the next level. The movement and tweening that can be added to scrolling menus will make the whole user experience feel much slicker.
There was also lots of talk about developing solutions for the ‘3 screens’ using the well known MVC development model. All very exciting!
This was Pushbutton’s 3rd year attending the Mediaroom conference and its starting to feel like a real developer community is coalescing around a very solid platform.
James Cumberbatch, Director of Interactive Development, Pushbutton
Just read a great article over at Inside RIA about Flash to iPhone compilation. Some very interesting in-depth details about the interaction between the CS5 iPhone compiler and LLVM.
The gist of it seems to be that if you want your apps to run quickly then you need to employ the usual optimisation tricks, plus a few new ones specific to the iPhone environment. Of course, since the target environment is a low CPU, low memory device (compared to your typical desktop or laptop computer), you need to be extra careful to optimise your applications.
Some general gotchas to watch out for:
- Allocating new blocks of memory on the iPhone is particularly expensive. Reuse objects as much as possible to avoid object creation. If you’re nullifying an object, could it be added to a redundant object pool instead? Object pooling and up-front object creation can save you valuable processor cycles at runtime.
- Watch what’s on the display list. Since AS3 it’s been important to make that that you haven’t just made your objects invisible, you’ve actually removed them from the display list too. This is even more apparent on the iPhone, where processor cycles and memory are limited.
- Watch out with the drawing API. It runs slowly on the iPhone, and you’re better off dealing with loaded bitmaps.
- PixelBender is a no-no.
While we’re at it, another couple of interesting articles from Inside RIA about Flash and the iPhone:
Definitely interesting reading.
Adobe recently announced that in the upcoming release of Flash CS5, you will be able to publish your Flash applications directly to iPhone. Rather than publishing to a SWF, the output will actually be a native iPhone app, which can be downloaded from the App Store. You also get access to native iPhone APIs such as the accelerometer, tilt sensor, multitouch and geo-location.
We’ve been waiting for ages to get our teeth stuck into iPhone development, but the current set of developer tools means developing in Objective C. Being able to re-purpose any of our existing AS3 code for iPhone is a massive plus for us, and we’re pretty hyped to say the least.
Take a look at the announcement on the Adobe website to find out more. With this and the Open Screen Project pushing Flash based development to more and more devices, it’s a pretty exciting time to be working with the Flash platform.