Hopefully I'll be Watching March Madness Live on my Android Phone Next Year
21 Mar
Luckily, I’ve been pretty free on this opening weekend of March Madness. I’ve gotten to watch Northern Iowa’s big upset of Kansas and most of the other games throughout the weekend. I’ve switched to my computer several times when there was a close game going on outside of the one that CBS was showing in my area.
I’m pretty excited though, that next year I may be able to watch March madness live on my phone. I know he quality won’t be perfect, but having that option available on my phone (over 3G network) will be pretty awesome. I know there are other options available right now (if you’ve been watching the tournament you can’t miss the commercials with everyone in exotic locations yelling when their team wins at the buzzer) but this would now be possible directly from within your mobile brower using Adobe’s Flash 10.1 for mobile. Flash on phones has always been a source of frustration because mobile broswers have never been able to handle it. A large percentage of online video, including YouTube (altough YouTube videos are encoded in 2 separate formats to allow the iPhone and Android phones to view the other format that doesn’t include Flash) are shown through Flash.
This kind of functionality makes me question Apple’s strategy of refusing to support Flash. Without Flash, the iPad can’t access Hulu video and other video that’s common on so many other sites. How can you expect the iPad to replace your laptop when it can’t access such a huge portion of the web? I realize HTML5 is supposed to start allowing video to be embedded directly within the HTML of a page without any additional encoding like Flash. But that’s an entirely different format that you have to count on content producers to migrate towards. It just doesn’t happen that easily. That’s a big reason why I have on real interest in getting and iPad, and why I thought Wired’s cover story this month on the iPad and the future of tablets was pretty weak. All it offered was some philosophical fluff from prominent tech figures without any real substance.
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