Adobe Takes To The Air With A Passion

The Age

Tuesday March 4, 2008

Nick Miller

Everyone cares what hardware you're using to play music and movies. iPods, it hardly needs to be said, are big business and a Trojan horse for Apple's move into music and video distribution.

But, below the radar, another battle is going on between the software players that sit on your PC desktop.

While you might not care whether you're playing a video file with QuickTime or Windows Media Player or one of hundreds of others, it's all part of the war for control over media distribution.

And another player, Adobe, has just joined the war, with its own stand-alone media player - still in beta but due for official launch soon.

Mark Blair, Pacific technical officer at Adobe, says the PC-based media player could be revolutionary. "We're not calling it TV 2.0 but we feel it's in that kind of space," he says.

Adobe is already an invisible leader in online video distribution: its Flash technology makes YouTube work.

But the media player takes Flash technology from the web onto the PC, in optional high-definition, full-screen format.

"We didn't have a desktop Flash video player of our own - if you wanted to watch it you had to use the web or third-party software from a company you've never heard of," Mr Blair says. "But Flash video is becoming ubiquitous, so it was unusual not to have one."

The player is built using Adobe's new AIR technology - indeed, it was used internally to "prove" AIR - and comes as a 3 MB install, which compares favourably to the more bulky QuickTime or Real alternatives.

But the value of the software to Adobe goes beyond its technical specs.

"Having looked at the market we found we could do something more than just a desktop video player," Mr Blair says. "There was the opportunity to do something exciting, to give us some differentiation."

Incorporated from day one is a "catalogue", which is the front end to ambitions for a full video-content distribution system - music videos, documentaries and TV shows - just like Apple's more hefty and well-established iTunes.

But unlike Apple, Adobe is giving content distributors more control about the way their videos are viewed.

They can use simple RSS (really simple syndication) code to "brand" the player with images and text, and to insert context-sensitive advertisements into a video feed as it plays and make a video more interactive.

American network CBS is playing with the system and there is also interest from non-traditional media sources such as Wired magazine and Lonely Planet.

Mr Blair admits it's early days and the platform will stand or fall based on the content it can gather. But he's already planning version 2.0. "I can imagine in the future we will be able to use this to integrate into social networks and to rate and share videos - this is a 1.0 release."

© 2008 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home