Tag Archives: video

Primetime Simulcast Helps Bridge TV and Digital Ads

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We all sense it, and the numbers support it. By the end of 2014, 200MM U.S. Internet users (76%) will regularly watch video online (source: eMarketer). Further, the number of mobile videos viewed by consumers has already grown at an impressive clip in the last year, and is forecasted to increase 160% in 2012 (source: Nielsen).

Audiences are increasingly viewing TV content on more devices, but broadcasters and network operators are challenged to evolve their business models fast enough. Media company customers tell us every day about their frustrations attempting to deliver and monetize content through IP-connected devices. Device fragmentation, multiple streaming protocols, different encryption methods, difficulty in inserting mid-stream ads, and the need to build players for multiple devices all contribute to higher-than necessary operating costs and a poor viewing experience for video audiences.

Today, in an industry-first, we announced Primetime Simulcast as a new advancement to Project Primetime. As media companies broadcast their linear content, Primetime Simulcast provides a single end-to-end workflow that enables them to simultaneously deliver that same content to connected devices everywhere while seamlessly replacing ads in the broadcast stream with dynamically inserted ads across desktop, iOS, and Android platforms. With this announcement, we also unveiled Adobe Media Server 5 and Adobe Access 4 to give media companies a single video publishing and DRM workflow that reaches 98 percent of desktops and all iOS, Android and connected TV devices. In addition, Adobe unveiled the next version of Adobe Auditude to more easily insert and measure online video ads.

As media companies deliver on the multi-screen promise to their audiences, Adobe is proud to help them increase revenue and decrease operating costs so that they can build effective businesses in digital video and improve the viewer experience. To explain Primetime Simulcast further, Ashley Still, director of product management at Adobe, walks you through the latest move forward for Project Primetime and demonstrates how these improvements allow media companies to advance professional video for publishers, advertisers and consumers.

If you’re at the Cable Show and want to see a live demo of Project Primetime or HLS Streaming with Adobe Media Server 5 and Access 4, stop by and see us at Elemental’s booth #2253.

Flash Media Server 4.5.2 Released with Robust HTTP Streaming Failover

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Version 4.5.2 of Flash Media Server is now available. Besides numerous bug fixes, it includes a major improvement – robust HDS/HLS failover for origins.

It’s not simply a “good-to-have”, but a “must-have” feature for reliable HTTP streaming deployments. The key issues it addresses are liveness and dropout situations.

Liveness is a server-side situation in which a packager advertises a stale bootstrap (that is, a stale view of a live stream).

Dropout is a server-side situation in which a packager has gaps in its bootstrap (that is, gaps in its fragment list).

Flash Media Server 4.5.2 introduces the following new features to address this:

Best-effort fetch

Best-effort fetch enables the OSMF and iOS video players to continue playback as normally as possible in the presence of short-term liveness and dropout problems on the server-side.

The OSMF 2.0 player adds client-side robustness by supporting best-effort fetch. Specifically, when best-effort fetch is enabled on the server, OSMF 2.0 attempts fetches for fragments that have not been advertised in the bootstrap, but are expected to be present.

For iOS Video players, FMS 4.5.2 enables best-effort fetch for HLS as well.

Control plane application

To implement HTTP Streaming failover, it’s now possible to write a client application that manages the state of events and streams by using a set of REST-based control plane APIs. Control plane is a router term and in effect, that is what your client application does through these APIs.

You can find more detailed information in the FMS failover documentation.

HTTP failover is an absolutely critical improvement for more reliable workflows, therefore Flash Media Server 4.5.2 is an exciting new release for everyone with HTTP streaming deployments.

Download the Flash Media Server 4.5.2 upgrade.

Adobe Access – A Single DRM Workflow

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We recently announced the upcoming availability of Adobe Access (formerly Flash Access) DRM protection for native iOS applications. So what does this mean for your workflow?

You can now finally reach a broad range of destination devices with a single, simple workflow, including Windows, OSX, iPad, iPhones, iPods, hundreds of Android smartphones and tablets (Android 2.2+), and televisions, including Samsung Smart TVs, TIVO and LG devices, and soon many more as part of project Primetime.

It not only saves you costs, but also provides a simple, robust DRM workflow, with a single content protection scheme.

Not convinced how this will work? Here are the steps.

1)   Real-Time packaging and protection of H.264 source files with Adobe Media Server

2)   HTTP delivery to target platforms (HLS to iOS, HDS to other devices)

3)   License acquisition from a single Adobe Access server, no matter what the playback platform is

As part of Project Primetime, Adobe is focused on solving the fragmentation challenges video distributors are confronted with in 2012. This is the first step to provide a secure end-to-end video delivery workflow

Project Primetime to Enable a Single Video Publishing Workflow, Starting with Adobe Access for iOS and MPEG-Dash Support

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As part of the quickly evolving device landscape, a unified video publishing workflow is more important than ever. Individual workflows for specific devices or platforms are not a long-term approach. It’s like having to build a different car, depending on the city you want to travel to. It’s expensive and distracts from the important part of your video application, the user experience.

As part of Project Primetime, we are continuing to invest in our own technology and industry standards that enable our video customers to have a single workflow that enables them to reach any web-enabled devices.

What does this mean for you? Instead of having to worry about using different content protection, video delivery or video publishing workflows, Project Primetime will provide a holistic solution, which will make your video strategy uniquely easy to deploy, protect and monetize.

We’re making two announcements today that will bring the industry towards a single video publishing workflow:

Adobe Access for native iOS applications

Adobe Access, our robust Digital Rights Management technology, will support native iOS applications.  With Adobe Access’ existing support for desktop (99% reach via Flash Player), Android (via AIR 3.0) and Smart TVs (via AIR for TV 2.5), video publishers can now reach a huge digital audience with a single content protection solution.

Here’s how it works: Adobe provides an Adobe Access DRM library that can be integrated into your native iOS application.  You build your experience using the Apple SDK, add the Adobe Access library as a component, and deliver through the Apple App Store. The Adobe Access DRM library provides all the necessary robustness. The video content is streamed using Apple’s HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol, and Adobe Access provides the content protection required by studios.

MPEG-DASH support

We are announcing that our streaming technologies will support the emerging standard MPEG-DASH. It will provide the reach and flexibility required for a unified video workflow. It will not replace, but provide additional reach to existing Adobe streaming protocols. You can read more about our announcement here.

We are very excited about these announcements, which are first steps to provide a unified video publishing workflow that will offer the best reach, protection and monetization for video content.

Online Video Is Ready for “Primetime”

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We are excited to announce Project Primetime, Adobe’s integrated video technology platform to enable smooth, TV-like experiences for ad-supported videos across Web-connected devices.

Primetime creates a single workflow for premium video publishers and media companies that interconnects Adobe streaming technologies, content protection, analytics and optimization with the recently acquired Auditude video advertising platform.

By integrating content publishing, advertising, and analytics – video publishers will be able to give consumers a superior viewing experience through seamless dynamic ad insertion into any content type, whether linear, live or on-demand across Web-connected devices. Adobe Digital Marketing Suite is integral to Primetime, ensuring that media companies are able to combine consumption and revenue data to increase the relevance of their content and ads.

The Industry Needs Integrated Video Solution to Bring Content and Ad Dollars Online

The adoption of web-enabled devices by consumers over the past few years has been staggering.  Between desktop computers, tablets, smart phones, game consoles, and SmartTVs, consumers have at their fingertips billions of devices that can deliver media experiences over the Internet.

And, advertisers have long shown their desire to reach audiences in engaging experiences like video.  The “offline” TV advertising market will be $200+ B by 2014.  Within online advertising, advertisers want to shift spending video.  A recent eMarketer report (June 2011) forecasts video growing from about 14% to over 32% of total digital advertising spending by 2015, taking market share from both banner and rich media advertising.

The audience is enabled, the advertiser is interested – so why is less than 5% of professionally produced content available online?

1. The user experience for audiences viewing video ads today is inferior to television.  I don’t know about you – but my TV attached to my set top box doesn’t buffer between the programming and the ads.  But, with online video, the processing required to load client heavy advertising plug-ins often triggers that flickering circle. And who wants to wait for an ad to buffer?  No one – and that’s a problem for viewers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Primetime eliminates the need for heavy advertising plug-ins by moving more of the processing to the cloud, which means no more flickering circles waiting for ads to load, whether you’re on a desktop or mobile device. It feels like what you see on TV, but on any device.

2. Connected devices are fragmented.  My set top box could connect to any TV and playback the same content stream from my PayTV provider.  But online the opposite is true.  Every device platform supports largely different technology – making it complex and expensive for publishers to build video experiences for every device.  Today, publishers have to make hard tradeoffs on which devices to support – which reduces their audience size and revenue potential

Primetime enables a single workflow to reach the majority of web-enabled device platforms, whether smartphone, tablet, game console, desktop or SmartTV.

3. Inserting ads into connected devices is hard.   Connected device platforms have introduced new technologies and workflows for streaming video content – where ad insertion has not been well defined.  Creating scalable models for inserting ads into connected devices is exacerbated by the lower processing power of connected devices, versus desktop computers.

Primetime enables both server-side and client-side integrations of content and ads that allow for efficient and scalable delivery of monetizable video content.

4. Ad and content analytics are siloed.  Video publishers typically use separate systems (usually from different companies) to measure how their audiences engaged with content from how their audiences engaged with ads.  This impairs visibility into the correlation between audience engagement with content and ad revenue.

Primetime combines site-side analytics from Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite with ad analytics from Auditude to provide revenue-base analytics used to increase revenue and engagement.

In short – through an integrated content and advertising workflow and better data-driven monetization, Project Primetime will empower the content and ad ecosystem, which will make it possible for more content to flow online.

Primetime Highlights

As part of the first phase of Primetime, we are showcasing Primetime Highlights, which enables video publishers to create and publish live event highlights, with ads, in minutes.

Event highlights are a great way to show the power of integrating video publishing and advertising.  First, viewers only watch highlights for a few hours after events occur.  If you can’t quickly publish and monetize a highlight, it’s not worth creating it.  Second, user experience really matters with short form content – viewers are more likely to abandon if there is buffering, etc.

How does it work?  We’ve created a highlight tool that is tightly integrated with the Auditude ad platform.  The highlight tool lets you set the in and out points of the clip, and add metadata like title, genre, etc.  Once you hit publish, the Auditude platform automatically knows that ad inventory is available, and can target ads based on the metadata entered in the highlight tool.  To make this even easier to implement, we are also providing a full video player*.

Here’s a video of how it works:

After acquiring Auditude about three months ago, we are thrilled to be bringing Primetime to market to accelerate online video, starting with Primetime Highlights.  Expect us to be equally aggressive in supporting 24×7 linear, on-demand, and live with more announcements coming throughout 2012.

Check back tomorrow for Jens Loeffler’s take on our Adobe Access support for iOS.  And, for more insight into our MPEG-DASH announcement, see Kevin Towes’ blog post here.

 

Winning Tablet Apps for Adobe AIR App Challenge, Sponsored by Sony, Announced

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Today, Adobe and Sony are excited to announce the winners of the ‘Adobe® AIR® App Challenge, Sponsored by Sony’. The contest launched in July to drive the creation of breakthrough Flash based apps powered by Adobe AIR for the Android-based Sony Tablet™ S and Sony Tablet™ P. The winners will receive a cash prize plus premium promotion* of their app for Sony Tablet S and Sony Tablet P via Sony’s Select App, the website with a shortcut icon on the tablets’ home-screen to highlight Sony-recommended Android™ apps.

Hundreds of entries were received from developers in eligible countries, including Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and USA. The winning apps in five categories (excluding ‘MAX Public Favorite’) were selected by a panel of Adobe and Sony judges and industry experts. Submitted apps were judged based on quality and performance on Sony Tablet S and Sony Tablet P, innovation and creativity, and overall user experience. All apps are now live and available for download from Android Market™ – visit the links below. Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who submitted an app!

List of Winning Applications by Category

  • Grand Prize ($100,000 US): Tweet Hunt,  by RED Interactive Agency
    • Tweet Hunt is a classic shooting gallery game powered by Twitter.

  • Best Game ($20,000 US): Conveyor, by drMikeyStudios
    • Conveyor is an addictive word game – race the clock to score the most points!

  • Best Entertainment App ($20,000 US): Kidoodle: Pirate Scribblebeard, by Kidoodle Apps
    • Join Oscar, Josephine and Pirate Scribblebeard in this groundbreaking new type of interactive, animated, drawing app for kids.

  • Best Business & Productivity App ($20,000 US): Conqu, by AsFusion
    • Conqu is an easy-to-use yet powerful task management application that will help you conquer your inbox with style.

  • Best Lifestyle & Community App ($20,000 US): Sylvester’s Band, by Uncle Handsalt
    • Sylvester’s Band is Sylvester’s Band an interactive book for children ages 2-7, with 35+ pages and English voiceover.

  • Most Innovative App ($10,000 US): LEVEL, by drMikeyStudios
    • LEVEL is a puzzle-platformer with a twist. Designed specifically for the Sony Tablet P, LEVEL takes specific advantage of the two screen layout.

  • MAX Public Favorite ($10,000 US): Cassandra Stand – News & Clock, by Small Screen Design
    • Transform your tablet into a useful stand with date & clock, weather forecast and top stories from more than 50 countries. (Announced last month at MAX 2011, Adobe’s annual developer and designer conference, based on a public vote from the ten applications selected for the Adobe MAX Showcase prizes).

The Android-powered Sony Tablet S and Sony Tablet P devices combine all of Sony’s innovations rolled into one including unique hardware, content and network services with seamless usability to create a world of engaging networked entertainment experiences.

Sony Tablet devices are distinguished by four key features that set them apart from any other tablets on the market. These include: optimally designed hardware and software, a “swift and smooth” performance, cross-device connectivity and network entertainment services including Video Unlimited and Music Unlimited, PlayStation® Store and Reader™ Store.

Sony Tablet S is optimized for rich media entertainment on its 9.4-inch touchscreen display and its unique asymmetric design allows for hours of comfortable use. With a powerful NVIDIA® Tegra™ 2 mobile processor, the Sony Tablet S lets you enjoy the web as well as your favorite content and applications on its large, high-resolution screen and built-in Wi-Fi® compatibility means Internet connectivity virtually anywhere there’s a hotspot.

Available in 2012 exclusively on AT&T’s mobile broadband network, Sony Tablet P is ideal for mobile communication and entertainment. With its revolutionary folding design and two 5.5-inch displays, it can easily fit into a pocket, purse or backpack. Sony Tablet P is both Wi-Fi and 3G/4G capable allowing users access to digital content including videos, games, and e-mail, while on the go, nearly anytime. Taking advantage of its unprecedented design, Sony Tablet P allows for dual screen functionality  within specific applications, , such as playing games on one screen while using the other as a controller or reading e-mail on one screen while using the other as a software keyboard.

For additional contest details, please visit the ‘Adobe AIR App Challenge, Sponsored by Sony’ website at http://airappchallenge.com. For more information on Adobe AIR, go to www.adobe.com/products/air.html.

* Requires signing a premium promotional agreement with Sony

Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5

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[Also posted on Adobe's Conversations Blog]

Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML.  Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.  We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.  We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.  We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video.  Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection.  Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences.  We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders.  And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.

We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash.  Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices.  There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!

Danny Winokur is the Vice President and General Manager of Interactive Development at Adobe

 

[UPDATED: 11/15/11 at 6:40 p.m. PT]

Read these related posts from Adobe’s Ben Forta, Thibault Imbert, Lee Brimelow, Pritham Shetty, Mike Chambers, Andrew Shorten and Deepa Subramaniam:

Some Thoughts on Flash and Devices
By Ben Forta
http://forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/11/9/Some-Thoughts-On-Flash-And-Devices

Adobe AIR and Flash Player Team Blog- Focusing
By Thibault Imbert
https://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/11/focusing.html

Flash to Focus on Apps for Mobile
By Lee Brimelow
http://www.leebrimelow.com/?p=3151

Adobe Flash for Premium Video
By Pritham Shetty
http://blogs.adobe.com/ktowes/2011/11/adobe-flash-for-premium-video.html

Flash Professional and the Future
By Mike Chambers
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/10/flash-professional-and-the-future

Clarifications on Flash Player for Mobile Browsers, the Flash Platform, and the Future of Flash
By Mike Chambers
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/

Your Questions about Flex (UPDATED: 11/15/11)
By Andrew Shorten & Deepa Subramaniam
http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html

 

 

Announcing Flash Player 11 and AIR 3

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Today, we’re excited to announce that Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be launching in early October. These milestone releases introduce the next generation of the technologies that deliver stunning content and apps to over a billion people — across screens including Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows, Mac, and connected TV devices — pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the web.

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 take these even further by introducing Stage 3D, a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. It enables new classes of console-quality games and immersive apps, such as Tanki Online and Zombie Tycoon (see videos below). Stage 3D enables content that efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second — the result is fluid, cinematic app and game experiences. Additionally, these releases deliver new features to support theater-quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high-quality HD video conferencing, and a powerful, flexible architecture for leveraging native device and platform capabilities. We’re turning the dial up.

 

Building Blocks

Flash began with a few bits of colored plastic, inspired by experiences of playing with LEGOs as kids. Over 15 years, Flash has provided some of the most creative building blocks for designers and developers, pushing innovation and helping the web to evolve and iterate at a rapid pace defined by creativity. Flash made fluid animation an integral part of the web, defining our modern expectations for smooth, animated user interfaces. And since then, Flash has made features such as rich typography, beautiful interfaces leveraging dynamic vector and raster graphics, dynamic synchronized audio playback, advanced scripting, and seamless HD video mainstream — not just as experiments waiting to reach the world, but capabilities accessible to virtually every connected computer on the Internet. Many of the capabilities that Flash pioneered have over time moved into web standards and browsers, and will continue to do so as Adobe works closely with the web standards community and continues to develop products that support and advance HTML5. Piece by piece, Flash has enhanced and upgraded what’s possible for over a billion people on web, and Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 continue that tradition.

The Next-Generation Console Has Arrived

Today, approximately 70% of web games are powered by Flash, along with 9 of the top 10 games on Facebook, about 70% of the games on Google+, and the top social games from companies like Zynga and EA. Games at their best are fluid, immersive experiences, and the unmatched consistency of Flash Player allows game developers to focus on making great games rather than fight fragmented technology. Games just play. And play big: Flash Player brings an audience over 11 times larger than that of the best-selling current generation game console.

Flash Player 11 is the next-generation console for the web: now with Stage 3D (codenamed “Molehill”), it provides a consistent platform for gorgeous games and rich engaging content — hundreds of millions of users will be able to instantly upgrade to a whole new level of games on the web with a simple update, ready to experience amazing games using Stage 3D when they come to market later this year and early 2012. With stunning hardware accelerated graphics, mature dynamic audio, immersive full screen, native support for mouse/multi-touch/camera input, low-latency peer-to-peer multiplayer networking, full HD 1080p video playback, and high-quality voice chat, Flash Player provides the building blocks for incredible games.

Everyone wins. Content using the new Stage 3D APIs will automatically take advantage of modern GPU hardware, from integrated graphics chips to the most advanced high-end graphics cards, to provide incredibly fluid graphics — and Stage 3D also provides accelerated software rendering for content on older computers (yep, even mom’s old PC with Windows XP), where it runs up to 2-10x faster than software rendering in Flash Player 10. In other words, all computers with Flash Player 11 can benefit from the accelerated performance of Stage 3D. And game publishers can also package their Flash technology-based apps using AIR to deliver them across Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows, Mac, and connected TV devices. To learn about some of the benefits of the Flash Platform for game publishers, check out the new Adobe Gaming Solutions page at www.adobe.com/go/gaming.

Hear more about the Stage 3D accelerated graphics architecture from the Flash Runtime team:

Adoption of new Flash Player releases has been accelerating — nearly half of the web upgrades Flash Player within four weeks of a new release — so websites can expect that many of the over 1 billion people with Flash Player will be able to reap the benefits of Stage 3D soon, bringing modern GPU hardware acceleration to more people on the web than any other technology. The efficient Stage 3D architecture was designed from the ground up with resource-constrained mobile devices in mind — the full, optimized rendering model will be supported on smartphones and tablets as well, and we’re making this support available in a private prerelease.

Combined with high-level graphics frameworks built on Stage 3D, including a range of specialized, optimized third-party graphics frameworks and game engines, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 make incredible graphics performance everywhere accessible to a range of developers, whether they’re building rich 3D visualization apps or sophisticated, expressive games. Some of these great frameworks include Alternativa 3D, Away 3D, Flare 3D, Minko, and Yogurt 3D. Adobe will also soon make a 3D framework technology preview called Proscenium available on Adobe Labs. Proscenium will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype experiences focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections.

And we’re especially delighted to announce Starling, a flexible, lightweight framework for 2D graphics and animation that combines the simplicity of Flash with the incredible power of modern hardware accelerated graphics provided by Stage 3D. The Starling Framework is a free and open source ActionScript library designed to be instantly familiar to developers and designers using the traditional Flash display list. Starling and Stage 3D in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 enable easy intuitive GPU-accelerated graphics programming for everyone. Beautiful is now simple.

Particle effects with Starling and Stage 3D in Flash Player 11:

Rolling Forward

We’ve seen lots of momentum with Flash Player and AIR, especially in these areas:

Gaming: Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 allow game publishers to instantly deliver engaging games to anyone with a PC, tablet, smartphone, or connected TV. And with Stage 3D, game publishers and developers can take their games to a new level, creating new opportunities for game developers and publishers to deliver and monetize their content. Two of the many upcoming games leveraging Stage 3D include Tanki Online and Ultimate Race Championship.

To experience a tablet game with Flash today, check out Machinarium, an award-winning puzzle and adventure game for the iPad 2 that within one day became the #1 game on iTunes in the U.S. and 12 other countries, #1 app overall, and “iPad Game of the Week” — and it’s coming soon for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook (play a demo right in your browser with Flash Player). Visit the Flash Game Technology Center to learn more about building games with Flash. And check out this short video on Machinarium and upcoming Stage 3D -enabled content

Rich media and premium video: Leading content providers, including Amazon, ESPN, HBO, Hulu, and YouTube, deliver premium HD live video and video on demand (VoD) using Flash technology to reach multiple screens, while benefiting from adaptive streaming, content protection, smooth hardware-accelerated HD video playback, and expanded audiences with Adobe Pass for TV Everywhere. Even the animals are in on it: the California Academy of Sciences uses Flash to share a waddle of cuteness with the Pocket Penguins app for Android and iPhone.

Data-driven apps: Flash enables highly interactive, collaborative applications across devices and distribution channels. Using Flash and AIR, the St. Petersburg Times delivered the PolitiFact app on the Apple App Store, Android Market, and BlackBerry App World — a #1 paid news app on iTunes.

 

Snapping Key Pieces in Place

Some of the other benefits coming with Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 include:

A fully modern architecture. Flash Player 11 delivers full native 64-bit support for 64-bit browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, while also leveraging advanced processor optimizations to deliver additional performance.

Uncompromised experiences everywhere. Native extensions in AIR 3 allow developers to take advantage of existing native code libraries and deep native hardware and OS capabilities, such as sensors (gyroscopes, magnetometers, light sensors, etc.), multiple screens, native in-app payments, haptic/vibration control, device status, and Near Field Communications (NFC).

Simple, instant app install. Developers can package their apps with AIR 3 as a captive runtime for one-click, seamless installs on Android, Windows, and Mac OS (in addition to iOS) without any additional runtime download.

And there are dozens more new capabilities in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 that web and app developers will be able to take advantage of to create beautiful new experiences. Check out our press release and Labs release notes to see the complete list of what’s new, and we’ll be highlighting more of these features in the future (and even more at Adobe MAX). We look forward to delivering the release versions in early October, and if you want to get your hands on them now, you can download the release candidate versions from Adobe Labs today. With Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, we’re providing some amazing new building blocks. We’re thrilled to see what you create with them.

Adobe Advances Broadcast Creation to Delivery Workflows at IBC

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This week at International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) in Amsterdam, Europe’s largest show for broadcasters, Adobe’s video solutions team is showing off new versions of Flash Media Server and Flash Access, continuing to innovate on new, streamlined solutions for businesses to stream and protect premium video content. A highlight of both new products is enhanced support for mobile platforms.

With Flash Media Server (FMS) 4.5, media publishers can extend their already broad mobile reach via Flash-enabled devices, with the new ability to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices, enabling them to reach the widest audience possible. Adobe’s Kevin Towes writes more about what’s new in FMS 4.5 on his blog.

Adobe Flash Access 3.0, a robust content protection and monetization solution, will enable content owners to deliver on-demand content with massive scale and strict studio-level security across a broad range of devices, following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 (release candidate versions are now available for download on Adobe Labs). More info about the latest enhancements in Flash Access can be found on Florian Pestoni’s blog.

Watch this video from Adobe’s Pritham Shetty where he discusses Adobe’s video solutions news at IBC, including Flash Media Server 4.5, Flash Access 3.0 and momentum for Adobe Pass—a solution for broadcasters, programmers and content portals to seamlessly and securely establish a user’s entitlement to premium content anywhere, anytime and on virtually any device:

If you’re attending IBC, stop by the Adobe booth in Hall 7, Stand 7.G27 and follow the Flash Platform Facebook and Twitter channels for updates on news from the show.

Adobe continues to advance Flash.

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Adobe teams have been working hard to innovate around new tools for HTML5 and the Flash Platform. We truly believe that it’s important for the web to have a driving force for innovation and consistent playback of rich content across platforms and browsers regardless of what codecs are used – H.264, VP8, VP6, Sorensen, AAC or others.

We see several key opportunities for the Flash Platform that are not fully enabled by standards and other formats available today:  Rich, casual games; premium video with content protection and video enhancements like overlays and other effects; rich Internet applications in enterprises and on the web with data-driven features; and digital publishing.

Following the release of AIR 2.6 for Android and last week’s Incubator release of the new “Molehill” 3D GPU accelerated APIs at the Game Developer Conference, Adobe today released a beta version of Flash Player 10.3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Flash Player 10.3 provides key features to developers, content publishers and end-users. And we expect to bring them to mobile devices in the future.   Try them out and let us know what you think.

  • Media Measurement – Measuring video just got easier. With Flash Player 10.3 and Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, developers can implement video analytics with as little as two lines of code for the first time.  Web analytics solutions can use a new set of open APIs to easily implement consistent video analytics irrespective of implementation or delivery protocol.  Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of channels driving viewers to videos, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.
  • Acoustic Echo Cancellation – Flash Player 10.3 enables developers to create real-time online collaboration experiences with high-quality audio, such as telephony, in-game voice chat, and group conferencing applications. Developers can take advantage of acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various microphone input levels. End users will be able to experience higher quality audio facilitating smoother conversation flow, without using a headset.
  • Integration with browser privacy controls for managing local storage – Users will have a simpler way to clear local storage from the browser settings interface – similar to how users clear their browser cookies today. Flash Player 10.3 integrates control of local storage with the browser’s privacy settings in Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and higher, and future releases of Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Also see a related post by Emmy Huang in January.
  • Native Control Panel – Flash Player 10.3 provides users with streamlined controls for managing their Flash Player privacy, security and storage settings. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can access the Flash Player Settings Manager directly from the Control Panels or System Preferences on their computers.
  • Auto-Update Notification for Mac OS – Flash Player 10.3 supports automatic notification of software updates on Mac OS, making it easier for Mac users to stay current with new capabilities in the latest version of Flash Player.

To download the beta release of Flash Player 10.3, visit Adobe Labs. We look forward to hearing your feedback, which will help us make Flash Player better for you.

P.S. For a preview release of Flash Player with 64-bit support, please check out Adobe Flash Player “Square” for developers on Adobe Labs.