Today, from the Cable Show in Boston, the Adobe Video and Ad Solutions team announced several updates to Project Primetime, the industry’s first fully integrated video technology platform to deliver seamless viewing experiences for ad-supported TV content across connected devices. These updates included Primetime Simulcast, Adobe Media Server 5, Access 4 and the next version of Adobe Auditude. Jeremy Helfand, vice president of monetization at Adobe, penned a blog post covering the announcements. To further expand upon the news, Ashley Still, director of product management at Adobe, shot a demo video to visually expand upon the news. Find out more about Project Primetime and all other Video, Gaming and Digital Publishing updates through our Digital Media blog.

Today, Adobe is hosting its annual Digital Publishing Summit in New York City. Currently, the DPS team is live blogging from the event here. At the Summit, Adobe announced the next generation of digital publishing features including Content Viewer for iPhone, social sharing, expanded font licensing and enhanced integration with Adobe Creative Suite 6. These new features allow traditional media publishers, corporate organizations, ad agencies as well as individual freelance designers and small design firms to publish, distribute, monetize and optimize a new class of innovative digital media. See the full announcement here and participate in the live blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/dpsnyc2012/.

Creative Cloud is here! As the way we work evolves, so has Adobe’s offerings. You can now get your Creative Cloud membership, which starts with the complete Creative Suite 6, as well as Adobe Muse, our new visual web design tool, and Edge, the HTML5 animation app. Add in Business Catalyst for web hosting, Typekit for fonts, and up to 20 gigabytes of cloud storage for syncing and sharing your files. Why is Creative Cloud so transformative and what does its future hold? Get the story from Jeffrey Veen, senior director of products.

How we connect with you, our customers, sure has changed a lot over the years. Snail mail and phones led to emails and web forms – and now Twitter, Facebook, blogs and even Instagram are the social communications tools du jour. There are so many different places we can chat that we thought it would be good to gather a public list of our main social channels. These are the top “corporate” (for lack of a better term) accounts where you can learn what Adobe is doing, connect with others in the Adobe community, and ask us questions. Remember that you can also find your favorite products on social channels too – just do a quick search.

Let’s talk! (And share, and chat, and send images, and post videos…)

Adobe on Facebook

• We’ve rolled out the new Facebook timeline and have a couple of cool new apps to check out, including CS6 Sneak Peek videos. We’ve also enabled Direct Messaging on the Page so if you are on Facebook and have a question for us, send it to us directly for a quicker response.

Adobe on Twitter

• We are online and ready to chat from 9am – 6pm PT Monday-Friday.

Adobe on Linkedin

• Right now our LinkedIn presence focuses on job opportunities and life at Adobe from the perspective of employees, but we’re currently updating it to include a ‘Products and Services’ tab as well.

Google+

• Do you live in your gmail account? We’re starting to up our Google+ activity so be sure to add us to one of your circles.

YouTube

• Like to watch? We have videos of products and people and events. We’re also in the process of redesigning our channel, so stay tuned…

Pinterest

• We find all sorts of things pinteresting, with a focus on design, web, video, photography and more – it’s all the great things you’re creating. Check out our boards.

Instagram

• It isn’t just for iOS anymore. Now that Instagram is on Android, most of the world can share their real-time photos. We share photos that give an inside look at Adobe — backstage at events, Adobe staffers, even lovely pics of our cafe. Join our stream, yes? We’re easy to find – look for “Adobe”. :-]

The launch of Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 has us all thinking about — creativity of course! Where do the creative juices flow from, when you’re designing a web page, making a movie, writing a song and even building out an entire ad campaign? Our Adobe & Stories site just re-launched and we’d love to read yours, see images about it or even “watch” it if you have a video.

And for all of you in North America and Canada, we’re giving away tablets to 6 lucky storytellers! A tablet of your choice – just check out the site for full terms and conditions.

We’ve had a few stories come in already that we think are pretty great:

• “Having developed an international reputation for creating altered photographs with ecological concerns, in Antarctica I became interested in creating an editorial (relatively unaltered) body of work to compare and contrast these two modes of perception and expression…A simple project initially, it continues to grow. A single exhibit and book has become multiple exhibits and books, lectures, a website and Antarctic workshop program…I started using Photoshop 1 as an artist in residence at Kodak’s Center for Creative Imaging. I beta-tested Lightroom 1…” — Read more about the project from the story’s author John Paul Caponigro

• “I’ve been looking for ways to make the color images from my Sony a850 pop a little bit more. I love shooting the camera in B&W mode and find that a simple conversion to grayscale in Photoshop and then some tweaking of the curves usually results in fantastic images. The same has not always been so with the different color modes on the camera. I usually shoot in vivid mode with the contrast and saturation bumped up a couple of steps, however differing light and weather sometimes still left the images looking a little bit flat. After reviewing many tutorials online about maximizing the look and feel of color images with Photoshop I came up with this simple method…” — Read more about Peter Ellenby’s method in his story

Now it’s your turn: Why do you create?

Are people living up to their creative potential? In a word, no.

This week, Adobe released global research in a State of Create report to uncover how people feel about their own creativity as well as its role in the economy, society, the workplace and our educational institutions.  The findings were enlightening.  A few highlights from the data:

• 8 in 10 feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth
• Only 1 in 4 believe they are living up to their own creative potential
• 75% said they are under growing pressure to be productive rather than creative at work
• More than half feel creativity is being stifled by the education system – and that feeling rises to 70% in the US
• Only about half of Americans would describe themselves as creative (global average is even lower at 39%)

We call this separation between the importance and the day-to-day reality of creativity the “creativity gap.”  That gap is pretty sobering.

So, what can we do to close the creativity gap?  First, we need to make time for creativity as well as provide the necessary technology tools and training.   Productivity and creativity should not be mutually exclusive – we all need to find ways to create at work, rather than considering it a weekend hobby or luxury for those with more time.  As for our educational institutions, they need to foster the growth of the entire child, with more opportunities to participate in arts programs and foster “out of the box” creative thinking.  Most importantly, we all need to think of creativity more broadly – it’s not just the domain of professional designers or artists.  It’s a critical capability in a successful society and one that is in all of us.

Please check out the full report online, and let me know what you think either in the comments section or on Twitter (@alewnes).

Today we are announcing two remarkable offerings… Adobe Creative Suite 6 and the all new Adobe Creative Cloud.

Creative Suite 6 is a killer release with hundreds of new capabilities rolling up to four focus areas:

• Application Performance. The Mercury performance work we started a couple years ago has now made its way to our imaging, video and illustration tools.
• Enhanced User Interface. Our tools are increasingly enabling direct, on-canvas editing of your content.
• Efficient development for Multiple Devices. Our tools are taking a practical approach to creating responsive content, so your web sites or apps look great regardless of the device or orientation they’re viewed in.
• Adobe’s unique secret sauce. The stuff that make things previously impossible suddenly possible.

Our customers helped us shape Creative Suite 6 and with it now in their hands, we will all experience things on the web and with mobile apps that we could never have thought possible. We’re going to see some incredible things.

It’s also important to realize we’re in the middle of a transformation in how content is built and delivered. With over 500 million smartphones selling each year, 400 million tablets expected to sell by 2014, nearly 1 billion people on Facebook and over 40 billion apps expected to be downloaded this year – the creative process is undergoing a significant shift. And we believe the Creative Cloud will help our customers go from idea to finished work more efficiently and with better results.

Creative Cloud Members will get:

• Great Tools. Members can download and install all of our CS6 tools and can use them even when disconnected from the internet. Members also get access to Muse (our new HTML5 tool for designers) and Edge Preview (our new HTML5 tool for interaction designers). They also benefit from deep integration with our touch tools like Photoshop Touch and Adobe Ideas.
• Storage and Sharing. Members content can be automatically synchronized across of their PCs, mobile devices and the cloud. The files are accessible from anywhere, on any device and easily shared with colleagues or clients.
• Publishing Web Sites and Apps. Members are able to host up to five websites for free and will be able to create and deploy digital brochures and catalogues to the iPad and iPhone.
• Ongoing Innovation. We view the Creative Cloud as a journey and intend to update its services often. Members will be guaranteed to always have access to the most up-to-date products and services all included as part of their membership.

We hope you’ll join us Monday morning online as we unveil more details about these technologies.

We couldn’t be more excited about both these releases and can’t wait to see what you do with them.

-David

Thomas Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop, has officially joined Adobe as an employee and Adobe Fellow, after 24 years as a collaborative consultant for our Digital Imaging team. His exceptional talent and innovation have been critical to the success of Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom.

Read more from Winston Hendrickson, Vice President of products, Digital Imaging, on our Photoshop blog.

Today at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, Adobe released its latest findings about online video advertising trends. The report shows increased viewer acceptance of TV-like ad experiences and key growth opportunities in online video advertising for media companies and premium content owners. Visit http://adobe.ly/wEGbkH to see the blog post from Jeremy Helfand, VP of monetization at Adobe, and to view the report.

Today, we announced that the upcoming CS6 Production Premium release will be previewed at NAB 2012, the biggest tradeshow in the world for the broadcast industry. At the show, we will be providing the first public demonstrations of the suite – including major updates for Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and Adobe After Effects CS6 –  before its official release.

New software and innovations that will be revealed include:

• Powerful new versions of Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Adobe Story, Adobe Media Encoder and Adobe Photoshop
• The debut of SpeedGrade CS6 for professional color grading
• The introduction of Prelude CS6 for logging and ingesting file-based and metadata workflows
• An elegant new user interface for Premiere Pro CS6  and  the inclusion of OpenCL support in the Mercury Playback Engine
• A significant boost for After Effects in performance and 3D capability

Discussing the Future of Film and Video

In addition to revealing CS 6 Production Premium, we’re participating in the NAB Post|Production World Keynote, which will address how the intersection of creativity and technology can help video professionals create impactful, engaging work more quickly than ever before. Adobe product manager Steve Forde will be joined  by two-time Academy-Award Winner Rob Legato , Steve Wozniak, and Fusion-io director of entertainment Vincent Brisebois.

The event takes place on Sunday, April 15 at 10:30 a.m. (room N249)

If you can’t attend the show and would like to find out more, please check out the CS6 Production Premium reveal page. The Premiere Pro, After Effects, Adobe Story and Audition Facebook pages and Twitter handles are great resources to follow conversation and live tweets: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Adobe Story and Audition, @AdobePremiere, @AdobeAE, @AdobeStory and @Audition. Users can also follow and participate in the conversation on Twitter with the #AdobeNAB hashtag.