It’s not often I say this, but could Adobe have actually produced a program I might enjoy having? I have huge gripes with Adobe over their long load times and slow response, not to mention horrible vista support when it comes to applications like Photoshop and Illustrator especially when their apparently the industry standards and i feel when it comes to the big mainstream corporate Adobe apps like those adobe needs a strong competitor to slap it in the head and get it back on track to streamlining.
But Flash is a different story, I don’t know if its because it was actually a macromedia product, or what but from the look of it flash itself seems to ooze wickedness. Even with adobe in the development seat. As you might recall a day or 2 ago I announced that adobe would be releasing the Adobe media player for flash content. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how wickedly amazing this program would actually be, I figured it would be basically a VideoLan player for flash, or some form of bloated itunes for flash. I was apparently wrong according to recent reports from the NAB conference.
According to first hand reports, the AMP is more like an rss reader for flash videos, it downloads and caches the videos, so that you can watch them online or offline. But since as i said it’s more like an RSS reader, it doesn’t just do playback, it also allows you to do cool things like subscribe to videos like a season pass where it can grab videos in a tivoesque manner. Whats even better is, from what i mentioned in earlier posts about other networks, Ad supported downloads, that are free and supported by advertisements will be fully supported in the system, and since the videos are cached offline with their advertisements as well, advertisers can finally stream seasons of shows to users and actually just use their normal commercials or modified online style commercials for their revenue source for the show, so that it’s more of a revenue stream like traditional broadcast tv. DRM is involved, you basically tell the application what sorts of products you’re interested in, and then it will show those kinds of advertisements to you. Then the application reports back to the content creator on which ads were viewed. Some people might not like this, but the fact is I think most people would take a few 30 second ad spots over 2-3$ per video.
Theirs also a huge announcement though, the AMP player improves FLV playback (the flash video format used by all only sites like YouTube and Metacafe), while at the sametime offering fullscreen playback support. (As you can see in the image above). Like I was saying before the DRM will be present, and it will allow for these ad supported free downloads. The DRM will apparently also allow the advertisers and publishers to choose if the videos are freely distributed or not, it leaves the control of limiting access to the content creators.
What I do find interesting though is something gizmodo points out as a possiblity for the advertising, beyond just a 30 second ad spot, dynamic product placement…
Content creators could get awfully obnoxious with this technology, though, with tricks such as embedded product placement, where in one week that soft drink can sitting in the background may be a Coke and the following week it might magically turn into a Pepsi, depending on who is paying the bills, which soda you prefer, or both. Advertisers will also have the ability to pop up annoying little clickable “bugs” that are targeted specifically to you. That could get old pretty fast.
The player looks wicked, and from what is pretty a parent will be quite skinable to look like the rest of the site thats offering it. And with the rss feed based distribution it should allow content creators and distributors like youtube to really simplify their delivery by just adding their videos to an rss feed. It’s great to finally see Adobe planning to release something they created (flash was by macromedia not adobe) that’s actually not bloated and overkill. I mean joost is great but the fact you need a 1mbit internet connection for any stability in the video, and even then the application is dog slow, makes one appreciate how great FLV’s really are.
Source: Gizmodo
