That Adobe Thing - Workshop, Presentation

Developing a Rich Video Player for the Adobe Flash Platform, Workshop
Wednesday, Oct 14th, 14:00-17:00

Implementing Flash Video DVR Functionality for Live Streaming, Presentation
Friday, Oct 16th, 11:45-12:30

Speaker:
Steve Allison, Technical Evangelist (EMEA), Flash Media, Adobe Systems.

Steve Allison hosted both the Flash Video Player workshop and the presentation on the Flash Video DVR Functionality. Both talks had a lot of overlap and shall here be covered together. Mr. Allison being an Adobe evangelist delivered what you would expect, Adobe advertisement, rather well-done though. The slides were shiny and the sessions were some of the most technical things of the conference. So let's have a look at what Adobe wants to sell us.

With Flash Player 10 and Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 Adobe offers RTMP-based adaptive rate-switching based on the quality of user experience. [link to the microsoft one]

The other new feature in FMS 3.5 is the DVR functionality. While transmitting a live-stream, it creates a file-cache on the server of what has been broadcasted so far, which makes it possible to rewind to an earlier point in the live stream. That time-shifting functionality does offer possibilities around ads and offering hybrid live-on-demand broadcasts. Good to see more advanced functionality arriving in streaming server products, we seem to kind of slowly getting over the point of trying to get just the basics right.

After looking at what is there currently, here an outlook on what Adobe has announced: In Flash Player 10.1 Adobe targets to converge all versions of the Flash Runtime: Flash Player, AIR and Flash Lite. We have to see how well the adoption on devices will work out, but finally having Action Script 3 on smart phones (I'm not speaking about Apple's walled gardens here) would definitely be a good step.

Of course Adobe had to react to the much-hyped advanced HTTP progressive download product introduced by Microsoft [link to article]. Adobe's take on the functionality is announced for Q2 2010, as a software independent of FMS (they said on any HTTP server, we'll see).

Flash Access 2.0 , announced for 2010 is introducing strong DRM to Flash that allows to restrict the user in what he can do with media material he might have acquired via Flash.

An actually very interesting part of Adobe's offering is the release of OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) that happened some months ago. It is a framework that replaces the video playback component on Flash with Open Source licensed code that allows to plug into all kinds of integration points for the video playback. E.g. advertisement, analytics, authorization, integration into social networks.

I asked about the plans on availability of Flash Media Encoder on different platforms than Windows and Adobe development tools on Linux, but the answer was, unsurprisingly, marketing talk about ongoing considerations on profitable OS platforms.