Synchronicity Live is a super cool web and desktop application that allows bands to record and stream live performances. The web application is written in Flex, while the desktop portion uses the freely available Adobe Flash Media Encoder application. Bands can sign up and then stream live concerts to fans, and record them to be viewed at a later date. Fans of bands can watch live streams of their favourite bands, or recorded versions of previous concerts.

The concert pages show information about the band, fans who attended the event, statistics on the show recording, and an online chat. The developers have implemented deep linking into the site, so you can easily link directly to bands or concerts, even though its a Flex application.

For those of you interested in the technical details, the company has a detailed page up on how bands can publish their concerts.

Take a look at SyncLive. Its definitely one of the top Flex sites I've seen - the custom skins hide the Flex components well, the combination of desktop software and web software is innovative, and technically the deep linking support makes the site easy to use.

It didn't take long for Hulu, the online video company from News Corp and NBC to jump on the Flash Player 9.0.0.115 bandwagon and offer HD videos on their site. For those of you wondering why RIAs are so hot these days, its right there. HD content was made available from Hulu on the same day that HD support in the Flash Player was added. It would have taken a bit more than a day if that support required a whole new browser or operating system.

Adding video to your RIAs got a little easier yesterday, and a little more affordable too. Adobe announced the release of Flash Media Server 3, which includes a number of features like h.264 streaming, along with a new pricing structure that cuts the price by 90%. There is also a developer edition that's available for free, limited to 10 concurrent connections. One of the new features for FMS 3 is the ability to stream video to handsets running Flash Lite 3. The handsets send back their profile information to Flash Media Server and the server sends the proper encoded file to the handset.

David Berlind wonders whether or not this means that we'll see more YouTube's on the Net. 75% of the video online is currently served in Flash format, so there's not much more room to grow there, but with H.264 support and a huge price drop, it might be possible.

The biggest feature of the new release is probably support for h.264. That's the same format used by Apple for their QuickTime videos and for BluRay DVDs. I think the biggest change in 2008 will be the death of proprietary video codecs. With Flash Media Server and Flash Player supporting h.264 video there's no reason to use anything else. Its a move towards a more open, standards based digital world, and I expect most online video will be using it by the end of 2008.

Bubble Guru is a neat start up that allows you to create and manage little "bubble videos", as you can see on this page. The site is built with a combination of Flash, PHP and Flash Media Server. Its super easy to record the video, as Flash can access your computer's webcam easily.

The entire service is hosted, so you don't need to worry about anything. The site allows you to manage your videos easily, and provides the code for you to integrate them onto your website. (Its two lines of JavaScript to add them to your site).

There are 3 plans available for you to choose from. The cheapest plan starts really cheap - free. You can record one video for a maximum of 20 seconds, and post this to your blog or website. There's a basic plan at $9.95 / month that allows you to record up to 5 messages of 60 seconds, and removes the Bubble Guru logo from the video. An Advanced package at $29.95 allows up to 25 recorded videos.

Spike TV has launched a new Flex based website that is well targetted to their primarily male audience. The site has an overview of all the shows on Spike TV, a section devoted to pictutes of scantily clad women, and another blog like section that they call "Rant".

From a geek perspective, there's a few interesting items in this application. First of all, the URL bar changes along with the application, another example of how people have solved the deep linking problem in Flash applications. (Check out the links to sections in the first paragraph of this blog entry). Users can send a link to a certain section of the site by copying and pasting the current URL from their browser, just like a regular HTML webpage.

Secondly, the site integrates video from Flash Media Server directly into the application, providing a nice, seemless experience for the end user. No extra plugins being launched or anything, just the one Flash application that loads images and text along with video.

Finally, the site also integrates advertisements at the top and on the right hand side of some pages. If anyone from the site design team is reading this, I'd like some more information on how you did this. Monetizing the work from Flex applications is something that a number of developers would be interested in, I'm sure.

After you've installed Apollo, the first application that you should install is the Finetune Desktop, available from the Adobe Apollo Showcase page. Finetune is a social music application that is miles ahead of Pandora. I've had it running all morning, and the music that its suggested so far has been great, similar to the experience I've had with Pandora. However, Finetune Desktop shines because it will also read in my iTunes library, and provide links to playlists for those artists.

Finetune uses Flash Media Server for streaming music, and PHP as the backend for the server. The application makes a series of REST calls back to the server, which returns XML that is read by the client application. This architecture allows them to create versions for the web, desktop (using Apollo) and even the Nintendo Wii (Flash is everywhere!).

Ryan Stewart has more information about Finetune. This is definitely one of the early Apollo applications that you should check out.

Mike Givens has created a Flex 2 based media player that will stream his MP3s using Flash Media Server. I think the best part about the solution is that you could build this for free. Flex 2 provides a free SDK that you could use to compile into .swf, and Flash Media Server is available for free (for limited concurrent connections) as well.