Adobe Media Player - MS Silverlight |

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April 16, 2007

Adobe Player Frees Viewers to Watch Video Offline
By Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe Systems Inc. unveiled on Sunday video-player software that lets consumers play back video online or offline, a move that could help reshape an acrimonious debate over video-sharing.

Adobe Video Player builds on the leading design software maker's Flash player, already the dominant technology used to stream video online by sites ranging from

YouTube to MySpace to MSN to Yahoo Video.

The video player is due to become available to consumers over the next several months, Adobe officials said.

Analysts hailed the new Adobe Video player as a technology breakthrough by allowing consumers to download and carry video from the Web to computers to mobile phones, while ensuring programmers can deliver advertising and track video usage.

Rival video players such as

Windows Media Player from Microsoft Corp.,
QuickTime from Apple Inc. and
RealPlayer from RealNetworks Inc.

run on a range of devices but have none of the offline tracking features.

"Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said.

"Control is something that media companies absolutely get high on," he said.

Fearful of piracy, media companies have been slow to release much of their TV, film and video programming onto the Web.

Last month, media conglomerate Viacom Inc. filed a $1 billion lawsuit against

Google Inc. and
its YouTube video-sharing site

for failing to thwart the piracy of MTV, South Park and other popular Viacom television shows.

At root, the debate over digital piracy has been a case of

digital tools
outstripping the power of copyright owners

to decide who watches what while also ensuring they can get paid.

The Adobe Video Player could ease such tensions by giving consumers a convenient way to watch, and even, in certain instances, to edit, video content, while assuring media owners they can retain ultimate control over where the video ends up.

"Consumers think: I bought my media, I own it, I should get to carry it with me from device to device. Adobe's video player works the way consumers think about media by giving them the freedom to carry it with them," McQuivey said.

Adobe officials said they have relied on a set of familiar, openly accessible technologies to create Adobe Video Player and will distribute the software, for free, using the same viral strategy that made

Adobe's Flash and Acrobat

into the most popular ways to view video or read documents, respectively.

It relies on open standards for syndicating content, synchronizing multimedia and advertising tracking. Consumers disturbed that media owners can track their consumption habits have the option of blocking such tracking.

And because Adobe is already a primary supplier of the prior generation of video watching and editing tools, the company may avoid the classic "chicken and egg problem" that delays adoption of most new Web technologies: Will consumers use the video player before media owners embrace it?

Adobe Media Player offers

higher-quality Flash video,
full-screen playback and
the ability to be disconnected from the Web — on airplanes, for example.

Viewers also can search for shows or share their ratings of shows with other viewers and automatically download new episodes of shows.

Mark Randall, chief strategist for dynamic media, said Adobe is working with a wide range of media companies, and plans to announce partnership deals next month.

The Adobe Video Player
offers a way for established media companies to securely offer ad-supported video but also independent video producers, podcasters and home movie makers.

Adobe, of San Jose, Calif., timed the announcement for the start of the National Association of Broadcasters show, a major industry event, now underway in Las Vegas.

The competition between Microsoft and Adobe sharpens as the two tech behemoths simultaneously unveil products meant at dethroning each other in some areas of the IT market.

Microsoft is known to have dominated the video-player market tyrannically with its ubiquitous

Windows Media Player application

- a tyranny the EU Commission did not accept, forcing the Redmond software giant to offer its Windows OS in the EU space without Windows Media Player.

Adobe is now challenging Microsoft’s domination with

Adobe Media Player,

which was recently announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2007 trade show.

Already owner of the popular Flash player which powers successful Internet start-ups like

YouTube,

Adobe makes a step further into the video solutions market adding new ways to distribute and monetize media, while at the same time helping users to discover and view high-quality media content both online and offline.

“Akamai and Adobe
have a longstanding partnership that enables the world’s leading media companies to deliver consistently high-quality Flash Player video experiences to global audiences,” said Paul Sagan, President and Chief Executive Officer of

Akamai.

“Adobe continues to be an industry leader in their approach to innovation by delivering new ways for audiences to experience rich, interactive content. We are excited about supporting this latest initiative that will make it easier for our joint customers to facilitate broad distribution of

Adobe Flash-based video.”

“Adobe Flash has revolutionized the distribution of video content across the Internet and Adobe Media Player builds on this leadership position,” said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer at Adobe.

“NAB is a great venue to preview the new capabilities Adobe is bringing to market later this year - as we build out a technology portfolio that will drive new advances in Internet video authoring, playback and commerce.”

According to Adobe officials the new player is due to make its debut in beta phase this summer, with the official release for the general public programmed for the end of 2007.

For viewers the Adobe Media Player

enables higher quality Flash format playback,
the ability to download and view videos offline,
ways to discover interesting new shows,
full screen playback,
one-click viewer ratings, and
a powerful Favorites feature that automatically downloads
new episodes of favorite TV shows or video podcasts.

For content publishers, Adobe Media Player

enables better ways to deliver,
monetize,
brand,
track and
protect video content.

It provides

an array of video delivery options for high-quality online and offline playback,
including on-demand streaming,
live streaming,
progressive download, and
protected download-and-play.

The Adobe Media Player

enables a wider selection of monetization and
branding options
including viewer-centric dynamic advertising and
the ability to customize
the look and feel of the player on the fly
to match the brand or theme of the currently playing content.

The technology provides content publishers a standardized toolbox to deploy a variety of innovative new advertising formats, and to compile permission-based analytics data, both online and offline, to better understand their audiences.

Building on Adobe's rich history of document protection technology, Adobe Media Player plans to offer content publishers a range of protection options, including

streaming encryption,
content integrity protection and
identity-based protection.

With Adobe Media Player, Adobe is trying to build
an eco-system for the creation of and delivery of next generation Internet video.

Along with Adobe Flash Player,
Flash CS3 Professional,
Flash Media Server 2,
Flash Lite mobile video playback technology and
Adobe Media Encoder for compression and live streaming,

the newly announced Adobe Media Player
shows the company’s ambitions to move forward from a predominantly Web-based business model.

Adobe Media Player
is developed using Apollo, the code name of Adobe’s recently announced application runtime.

Apollo
is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime
being developed by Adobe that allows developers
to leverage their existing web development skills

(Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax)

to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Apollo provides people with direct access to Internet applications

(including those built with HTML,
JavaScript,
Flash and
PDF)

without the need to open a browser, offering a familiar desktop application experience, and easier and more reliable interaction with content.

With Apollo, people can launch applications directly from their desktops and interact with them offline. When a network connection is available, newly created or changed content can seamlessly synchronize. In upcoming versions, Apollo’s integration with the desktop will allow people to drag and drop items, such as image files and other media assets, directly into Apollo applications.

Apollo enables familiar application interaction models, including

drag-and-drop support,
rich clipboard access,
and desktop
and system shortcuts.

Furthermore, Apollo applications run as regular applications, and do not have to run within another application or shell (as web applications do by running within the browser).

As a contra-offensive, Microsoft announced yesterday what was called

the Redmond Flash-killer,
a scalable video player technology
dubbed Silverlight

which allows for HD content to be viewed inside Web-browsers like

Mozilla,
IE7 or
Safari,

but with far greater customization and interactivity possibilities than its rivals.

Silverlight
already benefits from the early support of companies like
Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc.,
Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.

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JOHN LONGENECKER