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.