Two stories played out over the course of this week relating to Adobe. The first was that a hole appeared in its systems that had been exploited by some streaming media catchers, for instance one from Applian Technologies, which picked up a lot of publicity for its troubles. The story stated that Amazon’s online service was able to be pirated, and the whole affair stemmed from a security advisory issued by Adobe.
The second story was that the hole has been ‘fixed,’ by Amazon opting for the DRMed, and encrypted version of Adobe Flash Media.
All this is self serving nonsense. Adobe has undertaken a determined attempt to builder a media player on top of its AIR, a general purpose piece of Adobe run time code. It now underpins current versions of Acrobat, Flash and the new Media player binding them into a common eco-system so that DRM for instance, can be applied at the AIR level, and apply equally to any of the three applications that run on top. It’s new DRM system was only introduced this year, and prior to that Flash Video was only protected by encrypting the ‘Smile’ scripting language statements which decided which order video runs on the Adobe products. That way Adobe could ensure that adverts could not be stripped out. It also engaged in some obfuscation of where the unencrypted stream was played out, but it held short of encrypting it.
Adobe could see that Microsoft, already thought of as one of the best friends of the US Hollywood studios, was preparing Silverlight, which would use a new DRM called PlayReady. This would run on both handsets and PCs (the first multiplatform DRM that Microsoft has written) and it would provide a ready made method of protecting content on these platforms, so that paid for, professional content could be output safely in Silverlight.
Naturally Adobe wanted to block this retaliatory step by Microsoft, and make its own formats DRM encrypted and tough to hack. Which is why one team in Adobe has worked part of last year and most of this, to introduce a simple encryption server to intercept the PlayReady work of Microsoft.
The only trouble it had was getting the major content owners to insist to companies like Amazon that they should pay the extra bucks it would take to encrypt content, and now this story has seen to that. Likely outcome, another major online video supplier using the safe version of Flash Video, and proving to all content owners that this is the way to go.
The analyst cited in all the stories which ridiculed the original Adobe design neither appreciated that Flash video was mostly about protecting the advertising revenues, not the content, and that also Adobe is rounding up all the serious content providers that use its Flash system, and trying to get them to upgrade now it has DRM.
So the Adobe security bulletin issued in September was about how best to protect online content, effectively saying, now we have DRM, please use it and these stories have certainly accelerated that shift. Result, more revenue for Adobe.