Since digital media creators widely use Adobe tools to create and to distribute content, the company saw the opportunity to add playback and measurement to that ecosystem with Adobe’s just-announced Media Player.
Though the Adobe Media Player won’t be available for downloading until sometime this summer, the company’s Craig Barberich, group product manager in their Dynamic Media Organization, thinks its impact will be felt throughout the media industry.
“Adobe is the only company with all three pieces,” he said in an interview with Murdok about their digital media creation, distribution, and now playback tools. Adobe disclosed their Media Player plans today at the National Association of Broadcasters conference.
Barberich thought this was an apt venue for the announcement. It was twenty-five years ago that cable television had the big buzz, and just as many detractors. For 2007, “same buzz, different cable,” he said of online media.
Adobe started laying the groundwork for this news last fall, when they first started the Dynamic Media Organization unit. The new business unit had to come up with a way of capturing the last mile of online video, the one that reaches the viewing audience.
They have already enjoyed success with Flash from a creation and distribution standpoint; one would be hard-pressed to find a PC without Flash installed on it. As for distribution, Barberich said 76 percent of US broadcasters pushing out content use Adobe’s Flash Media Server to do so.
As has been well-documented here and elsewhere, Big Media doesn’t want its content being made available without a DRM scheme in place. Adobe’s Media Player, built on Adobe’s new Apollo platform, brings a couple of DRM methods along that should appeal to those media types who have been testing it.
The significant DRM of the two locks ads and content together. Barberich said the Content Integrity Protection used for Adobe Media Player means a video that goes viral will bring along the ads that might normally be left behind on a page hosting embeddable content. The other DRM component serves to lock content to devices, if desired by the content creator.
Ads placed in videos distributed for the Media Player can be of the dynamic “Flash bug” variety. Those ads and their interactivity happen in real time. A component available to content creators will allow metrics from those videos to be tracked anonymously; Barberich reiterated the ‘anonymous’ aspect of this a couple of times during the interview.
Banner and pre- and post-roll ads can be placed in video content, just as they are today. Through the tracking of these ads, marketers can see how well a targeted message performs with its audience.
The Media Player will use RSS to pull in content from around the web. People will be able to assign subscriptions to feeds to a ‘My Shows’ section. Content they own locally will show up in a ‘My Library’ area.
Barberich also referred to Adobe Media Player as being a “social TV network.” The social aspects of the player include features for rating and tagging content. Adobe made their player cross-platform, for the Windows and Mac markets.
