Multimedia application development on BlackBerry® BBX platform

During the BlackBerry® DevCon Americas conference in October 2011, RIM presented many nice features for their future platforms. Some are quite impressive. At the keynote session, RIM announced its vision of a "single platform" - its next generation OS called BBX that will be in both RIM mobile devices and playbooks going forward. BBX will take the best of the BlackBerry® platform and the best of the QNX® platform to enable powerful real-time mobile experiences. RIM's current QNX-based PlayBook provided a preview for the upcoming BBX. At the keynote session, there were a slew of impressive gaming application demonstrations on PlayBook.

RIM has put a lot of weight on gaming, which is understandable because gaming is an area where the power of RIM's PlayBook hardware and OS platform can show its impressive capabilities. At the same time, RIM's lack of emphasis on multimedia application development was also noticeable, with multimedia or video-based applications barely being mentioned at the keynote speech and in application demonstrations during the keynote session.

Multimedia applications (e.g., Video on Demand, Live Streaming, TV Everywhere) for entertainment, education, and enterprise are playing an increasing important role in our daily life. Providing multimedia information to any user at any time at any place is a very visible trend nowadays. It is also one area that RIM can differentiate with its powerful hardware and BBX platform. To be competitive and taking the full advantage of BBX, RIM needs to provide a series of enablers to assistant application developers to create next-generation multimedia applications. Examples of these include enablers for supporting live streaming and enablers for multimedia digital rights management (DRM). It is critical that these enablers be embedded in the OS and be open. While RIM bets its future on BBX, boosting multimedia applications by providing a best-in-class platform for delivery of secure multimedia will help differentiate its products and make it even more competitive.