Long standing online video enabler Brightcove thinks it has a shot at taking video to the phone using the same tools that it hires out to video owners, and will target a player that sits above the new Adobe Flash Player 10.1
Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 is the first fully configured flash video platform for phones, and replaces Flash Lite 3 which first brought Flash video to handsets. This platform is being readied for Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Windows Mobile and Research in Motion BlackBerry. The only mobile operating system supplier which will not allow Adobe Flash on its platform is Apple.
Adobe says that FlashPlayer 10.1 is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project aimed at making video work the same way on PCs, Netbooks, handsets and other consumer electronics devices. Much of this has meant improving the way Adobe actually sends video, so that it includes adaptive streaming and can adapt the video quality for a cellular signal.
Existing Brightcove customers such as AOL, Atlantic Records, National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Weinstein Company will be able to immediately target consumption on a handset, the company told us.
‘Flash Player 10.1 introduces a powerful suite of capabilities that improve the quality and consistency of video on mobile devices,’ said Jeff Whatcott, senior vice president of marketing at Brightcove. ‘We are excited to extend our online video platform with the Brightcove Mobile Experience, which makes it easy for our customers to publish high quality video across leading smartphones.’
The Brightcove part of the equation will take care of encoding in H.264 and of the CDN relationships which get video to mobile gateways. It’s software will create multiple renditions of video assets at ingest, usually between 200 kbps and 1.3 Mbps, and can even make one in HTML 5.0 for inclusion on the Apple iPhone. If the bit rate changes on the network it can adapt to a new rate dynamically.
‘Adobe did have some catching up to do in adaptive streaming, but it has done that now,’ Whatcott told us this week, ‘and recently we took over all the Fox.com catch up online video services with our system and Flash, which previously ran on a Move Networks system.’
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 makes it possible for mobile platforms to run the standard Brightcove video player with the same fidelity and features as desktop platforms, he said.
Brightcove says it supports media player styling, secure multi-bitrate streaming, deep audience profiling and analytics, sophisticated advertising, and the full universe of over 120 powerful media player plug-ins and extensions from Brightcove Alliance Partners.