Adobe this week announced support for H.264 codecs across its product line, including the new Media Player, now in beta due for a Fall launch, and its new run time environment AIR which is a common platform that sits underneath all of its software products. A new version of Flash player will also be available.
No-one so far has suggested that this is the beginning of a split with On2 Technologies, the provider of its proprietary VP6 codec, which has fired Flash Video to the top of the online usage charts, and last week On2 upgraded its Flix Engine encoding software to support H.264 after buying Finland’s Hantro Products.
The key to the announcement in our mind is an attempt to marginalize Microsoft’s Media Player, and to keep pace with YouTube, which is in the process of re-encoding much of its content using the industry standard H.264, because of its deal with Apple to play content on the iPhone.
It will mean that Adobe has to pay for an H.264 license as well as whatever licensing arrangements it has with On2.
The outcome should be that as if by magic, the Adobe Media Player, and Flash, will be able to distinguish between video prepared by On2’s codec and any H.264 encoding, and just play the file or stream on any device it sits on, which at present is likely to be all PCs and a large percentage of mobile handsets. What it WON’T play are any instances of Microsoft files or any files which are DRM protected by something other than its own DRM, yet to be announced.
Adobe has only this Summer taken rights to the Intertrust suite of DRM patents so that it can engineer a DRM of its own and bundle it into the new Media Player, and perhaps also into the AIR run time environment, so that every Adobe product can decrypt any service using its DRM.
Both moves ‘ H.264 and the addition of its own DRM ‘ are designed to attract premium content owners to using the AIR platform. Already Adobe has a piece of the software tools market, with products like Premiere and After Effects, a market fiercely contested with Apple and Autodesk, for building, editing and outputting all forms of professional video, with much of that being achieved through its long ownership of the Macromedia product line.
Now it wants to be able to output that video to the web, to TV channels and to cellular products, from a single creation point, in a point and click manner, taking the distribution woes out of the rapidly fragmenting video market.
‘Adobe is committed to providing a seamless creation-to-playback solution that allows creatives and developers to produce video and rich-media once, and then deploy that content across the widest array of distribution and playback environments,’ said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe.
One of the benefits of using Adobe products that can read multiple types of video will be to the advertising insertion industry that is trying to build up around video over the web. Instead of having to sense the nature of the video that video adverts need to be inserted into and keep on hand at least a dozen different copies of each video advert, they will be able to fire and forget, where AIR is involved, knowing it can read the files it is sending. In our view this will help the paid for and advertising driven premium video web markets centralize more and more on H.264 with fewer conflicts, and most of these thrown up by the waning Microsoft video effort.
Which is why Microsoft has been pushing a new format aimed at curtailing Adobe’s influence on the web video market in the form of Silverlight, so far managing to unseat Adobe at just a few establish Microsoft-friendly sites, such a Major League Baseball.
The beta of Flash Player 9, code-named Moviestar, which includes H.264 and the HE-AAC audio codec that comes with it, is available now and the final release is expected to be available via update in the fall.
Once the Adobe Media Player hits the market it will offer new forms of advertising types for ad supported business models, including pre-run video, and static advert on picture advertising. This week Google announced a similar advertising format which it calls InVideo, which it will use on YouTube and Google Video. It seems so similar to Adobe’s ideas of an animated overlay across the bottom of selected video clips which invite viewers to click and load a full advert, that we wonder if the two aren’t related.
Meanwhile partner On2 Technologies this week announced support in its Flix Publisher encoding and publishing platform for Akamai’s content delivery publishing and workflow tools. It seems to us this is a ‘no brainier’ integration, as Akamai is likely to deliver 70% or more of content that On2 customers create. This integration capability enables joint customers to easily encode and publish Adobe Flash video on their web sites.
Finally Kulabyte, the encoding specialist that has just licensed the On2 codec range for its bulk standard server based encoding platform, has also announced H.264 encoding support for Adobe Flash Player 9 using its TimeSlice technology, which it says speed up video encoding by properly harnessing dual core PCs, and which can work to High Definition levels. Kulabyte also outputs Microsoft VC1 video as well as VP6 and H.264 and offers a 2 pass Variable Bit Rate encode and claims a faster-than-real-time encode too for live events.