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MillimeterNAB 2008
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Perspective on this year’s show.
Adobe adds H.264 playback to the Adobe Media Player, which has yet to ship but will “shortly,” according to the company. Strategically, this was a great move, because H.264’s audio compression is vastly superior to MP3, and H.264 has much more live-encoding support than does VP6.
Adobe dominates news in the server area. The company will gladly demonstrate its Flash Media Streaming Server 3.0, which shipped in early 2008, to any booth visitors. In addition to supporting H.264 video and AAC audio, the new server provides two options for digital rights management (DRM), and it is much cheaper than previous versions.
Also at the show, Adobe will demonstrate the newly announced Flash Media Rights Management Server, which will extend additional protection to downloaded or progressive content targeted for playback on the new Adobe Media Player. Flash has long been (rightfully) criticized for the lack of DRM, but if you've stayed away from Flash for this reason, it's definitely time to take another look.
Adobe will dominate player-related news, showing off the H.264-capable Flash Player, as well as the Adobe Media Player. The latter should be an instant winner for anyone attempting to sell or otherwise monetize their content, allowing them to offer downloadable content to the remote viewer for high-quality playback, yet restrict distribution and retain the ability to advertise, brand the video, and retrieve key viewing-related data.
Both of the new players feature hardware scaling in both the Mac and Windows environments, which should enable smoother, higher-quality playback of scaled video. In addition, the Adobe Media Player will play .flv content, as well as .mp4 and .mov files containing H.264 video. The Adobe Media Player is the first application built on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which is a cross-platform runtime for building rich Internet desktop applications with Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, and Ajax that viewers can access online or offline. See digitalcontentproducer.com for an interview with Adobe Director of Product Management Simon Hayhurst.
Microsoft declined to rain on Adobe's parade for this article, but the company undoubtedly will have some compelling Silverlight-related announcements before or at the show.
To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer editorial staff at feedback@digitalcontentproducer.com.
