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Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
As we go to press, Apple confirmed what was already in the wind: that it would not have a booth at NAB. One of our Apple sources did remind us that the company will bring a technical sales force, and, of course, Apple's hardware will be visible throughout the show — at the Adobe booth, for example. Adobe Premiere Pro has had a better-than-anticipated return to the Mac according to Adobe's Jim Guerard, who had the welcome opportunity to make his annual pre-NAB pitch to journalists on the same day the Apple news broke.
Much has already been made of Avid and now Apple deciding not to market their wares at one of the most expensive tradeshows on earth. Both companies said they simply decided to do other things with most of those dollars — maybe take some of them as savings. Neither company has significant new spring product launches (at least not that we know of). Apple did that last year, and it got the requisite buzz return on its NAB investment. This year, the ROI calculation went the other way.
Adobe decided that NAB did fit its marketing plans, and for good reason. The company has a big story to tell — the kind that is well told at NAB. That story is, of course, Adobe Media Player and its enabler, the Flash Player, now supporting H.264. Adobe has been painstakingly laying the track for this new-media vision for several years now, its path converging both intentionally and serendipitously with consumer behavior and business need, supported by the virtual 100-percent adoption rate of Flash. (I'm briefly reminded of Avid's virtual 100-percent market share at another point in the digital revolution.)
A ubiquitous platform is a unique kind of opportunity, and in my opinion, Adobe has done well by that opportunity. Broad stroke, the Media Player is both an elegant response to what users have been teaching us and an ingenious kick in the butt toward the next stage of for-profit media. The devil will, of course, be in the details of implementation and ease of use. However, any wobbles won't be for lack of trying. The company has clearly invested considerable imagination in serving both viewer and what it calls “publisher,” and it seems to have gotten a lot of it right — including some watershed things. It's tapped into the proven user impulse to personalize the media experience — to be their own network programmers. At the same time, it's given established network programmers (and aspiring ones) a way to reconnect in a commerce-friendly way that is modern — it even has a way for profits to leverage off piracy.
New media lurches forward; it doesn't flow. It's messy, it's disruptive, and it moves at once too quickly and too slowly. But I think Adobe has harnessed the unruly moment. I would urge you to use NAB as an opportunity to see and understand what Adobe calls “the Flash ecosystem” and see if it fires your imagination the way it does mine.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
