JamieG Analysis

This week I was lucky to have a Flex evangelist from Adobe, Daniel Dura, come to my town of Melbourne to tote the Adobe line.  Of course, being a “digital media head” I drilled him on all the questions I could think of that would give me a peek into the future directions of Adobe.

During the presentation a few new technologies where mentioned.  This got me thinking and all of a sudden it came to me. (As I lift my small finger to my lower lip) I KNOW Adobe’s plan for world domination.

Before I spill my epiphany, I need to paint the picture.  Let us start with well known Adobe announcements and products.

1. 1. The adoption and release of Flash Player 9 revision 3 (MovieStar).  Apart from supporting H.264/AAC codecs, which is becoming the defacto standard for digital media, this new version of flash player also supports a new DRM.
This is a very important development as, for example, my demonstration on an older post here shows how a AVCHD camera can make files directly compatible with flash.  This allows me to simply drop a media file, be it from my AVCHD camera or something I just riped from a DVD onto my server.  I can then point any browser at it and watch any video I have on it.  Consider the future trends by end users with this functionality.

2. 2. Flash Media Server 3, with support for DRM type standards as 128bit AES encryption of streaming and PROGRESSIVE downloads. A new “very” reasonable lower price.
The improvements for FMS3 and the new price makes hosting your own content very reasonable and accessible.  You do not need to go to Apple/Microsoft Brightcove, etc and other media aggregators who charge you a premium to utilise their network that is optimised for hi-throughput content delivery (So watching the videos works well).
This technology does make it easy to do it yourself.  For many niche content producers, this is great news.
DRM, a four letter word to content consumers, is still high on the requested feature list of content owners.  Especially niche content producers whose content is only ever likely to go out contained within a DRM shell.  This will reduce the speed of content being moved into the general P2P network, and as such, maximise returns.  (Note, this form of DRM is very simple and straight forward, no CA’s and other complex issues exist.  I think it probably uses the one CA for all content from all FMS3 servers.  Still, not having to deal with key and CA’s is GREAT)
This, in my opinion, really lets the content owners decide which is the best way to monetise there content.  And it is being offered as a PRODUCT, not a SERVICE.  I.e. a service will usually scale its costs to your usage while a product is just that. You buy it and that is it.

3.3. Flash media player, a new BBC iPlayer type experience which ties into all the technology above.  Adobe Media Player will likely turn out to be the skinable iPlayer toolset that anyone can adopt and implement.  BBC may have spent big dollars on their implementation.  With Adobe Media Player, TV stations, or other content companies, SciFi channel, Disney Channel etc, could knock this stuff up very cost effectively.

4.4. All these technologies are based on Flex/Flash which predominantly has not been released as open source.  This is a huge deal to me, not that the media has picked up on it.  Sure, some aspects are still not open source, but the technologies that MOSTLY matter are.  What makes Flash what it is today, that type of information is open.  You could implement your own compatible versions of Flash Player, FlashCS3, FlexBuilder if you had the money.
Let’s not forget that Java, the flagship of the open source community has only recently been totally open sourced.  Flex/Flash is in a similar boat.  Some KEY issues are not open source, but those are where I feel they deserve to keep some cred as Flex/Flash is an amazing tool at an amazing price for what it does.
The open source community should really applaud Adobe here in my opinion.  They have donated a lot of code and specifications that they have spent years developing.  And to a degree, I feel Adobe and Flex/Flash have captured a lot of hearts and minds of open source developers.
But getting back to the “MOSTLY” part, and here is where the “World Domination” plan comes into play.  Of course all the aspects of the digital media delivery parts of the platform are not open.  One could justify this for security reasons.  But really, this is where Adobe captures the market and the “Capitalism stripes show”.

While talking to Daniel, he was not well informed about digital media directions of Adobe, apart from knowing the products well and the assumptions one can easily make from the information above.  I did, however, start asking him a lot of of where Flash Player was going.  And actually, there appears to be a lot of development in flahs player going on.  FlashLite3, for example can do H.264/AAC (From my understanding).  Also a lot of work is being done to optimise the ActionScript ECMAScript engine. This is obvious as the mobile phone is held high as the next major viewing platform. (Of some shape of form).

But really, mobile and the Y-generation is going to take some time to grow into this all pervasive video world.  What about the rest of us?

Let me now bring up some interesting post from others.

1.       Brightcove open letter to industry on Internet TV Standards.

2.       RSS-TV, a site set up to promote a new standard for Internet TV presentation of delivery.

Getting to reasons behind these ideas, what we need for our TV’s goes along these lines.

We need to implement a VERY SIMPLE implementation of Internet-TV into our televisions as was the channel changer of the original television we know so well. In the next few years, we are all going to have to switch over to DIGITAL-TV-Tuners.  Or Digital-Set-Top-Boxes.  These items have a small embedded OS which supports the minimal of features as switching channel and EPG.  Some also come with built in PVR with Hard Disk recording.

It is not a long stretch to ad, for example, an Ethernet port and some type of rich internet platform to make the TV into a window into the internet.

Is the light going on above your head?

Adobe has been spending a lot of time getting the flash player to run in these very limited and cheap embedded OS’s.  They have a lot of the hard issues already solved.  They have the products to enable this and knowledge already entrenched in to the Web development community.

Imagine a STB that you can not only program in your terrestrial Channels, but also rich media portals.  This would be as easy as telling it.

Channel 22 -> InternetTV/http://mediaportal.diseny.com
Channel 23 -> DVB-T/BBC
Channel 50 -> InternetTV/http://mediaportal.ANYONE.com

This will bring the Internet TV into the living rooms of our Mum’s and Dads or anyone who is internet-illiterate.  In my opinion, this is the tipping point of the end of TV as we know it. (Will not go away, Terrestrial is the best form of Mass streaming, Sports/news and general viewing)

Apple TV kind of does this now as it can NOW feed directly of RSS, but it is still designed to funnel people onto Itunes where you purchase content and Apple get a cut.  I disagree with walled gardens, and do not believe they will dominate mainly because of localisation issues (Another blog post topic really.)

Finally, let us look at Adobe’s business model.  Flash/Flex/FMS3, the costs for purchasing these products is quite reasonable.  Adobe is not trying to manoeuvre itself into the huge gatekeeper of content as Apple and Microsoft are.  They are selling products and give you the option to do it yourselves.  Some will, some will go with companies that offer different parts of the equation.  The real issue here is you, as a content producer, have a choice.

“Show me the money”.  And it is quite simple.  Adobe will make money out of all platforms with flash support.  Imagine a $5 cut on every TV and STB purchased, or purchased to upgrade your TV as analog TV is turned off in the next few years.

I must admit, I am very impressed.  As a blogger that analyses digital media trends from a technological stand point, Adobe “appear” to be giving us what we want.