In an article at Ars Technica today , Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, told the New York Times

“…that if fans want the show to live, they need to watch the broadcast because that’s how the money gets made. Stressing that live viewing is “of primary importance,” Tassler said that “We want them to watch on Wednesday at 8 o’clock… and we need them to recruit new viewers who are going to watch the broadcast.”

If CBS believes that only “appointment television” matters my best advice is to short sell Viacom. Appointment Television is dying. Every single trend points to the move away from Television of the 50′s and 60′s with limited channels where the family sat down together to watch.

But since then, Television has moved on to place more and more choice and control in the hands of the viewers. If CBS and it’s cousins at the other networks don’t see that as their future, they are dead. Short them!

Adobe have opened AIR to public beta. Formerly known as Apollo, AIR basically takes those Rich Internet Applications (RIA) from the browser and runs them in a cross-platform desktop environment. The biggest advantage of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), over a browser, is that it allows developers to do things in their application that are “forbidden” (for security reasons) for a browser to do, like have local data storage. (AIR includes a SQLite-like database for this purpose.)

Development is basically the same as for RIA as browser deployment. AIR is the basis for Adobe’s upcoming Adobe Media Player. At least Adobe are “eating their own dog food” or more politely, proving their own technology is at least good enough for themselves!

AIR, like Microsoft’s Silverlight, is unlikely to directly affect many video professionals except that it will probably spawn a dozen players.

With Sony appearing to have a format for any market segment, DV User in the UK have done a great job in bringing it all together in a comprehensive article.