Adobe has caved in to the naysayers who kept pounding on about RTMP being a proprietary protocol and about RTSP being too difficult to deal with, pushing instead HTTP delivery of streamed video.
The move came in Adobe’s Flash Player release 10.1 which it has now released for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks and PCs.
Adobe says that effectively this is a runtime release of the Open Screen Project designed to enable web browsing and delivery of HD video across HTTP networks.
In one fell swoop Adobe has changed direction and says that Flash Player 10.1 is updateable across all supported platforms, so all prior Adobe Flash software will be swept aside and we’ll soon all forget the religious argument about HTTP.
Microsoft has been one of the loudest of many voices talking up support for HTTP delivery, breaking video into small sequential chunks and able to reduce the delivery bit rate on any subsequent chunk of video, with about two second’s notice. Microsoft has been loudly banging the drum about Silverlight being better than Flash for this simple reason. It has insisted that existing Content Delivery Networks, such as Akamai, are better set up to deliver HTTP, treating the traffic more or less like web pages.
Adobe has added new mobile features to take advantage of touch screen technology, supporting multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen re-orientation.
Adobe has integrated the whole effort with its DRM system Access 2.0 and talks about the new system coming ready made with tools to help use HTTP. A public developer beta of the pre-requisite Adobe AIR 2.0 runtime, will be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS will come later in early 2010. Adobe is also working with RIM to bring Flash Player to Blackberry smartphones.