I was recently offered the opportunity to join a "seed project" at Adobe - a new business initiative that takes a product from concept to launch a short period of time. I can't talk yet about what the project is - only that it involves real time communications within Flash, Flex, and Apollo applications.

It was a difficult decision to leave FMS - the team is amazing and the product is at the forefront of the Flash Video explosion. However, the chance to start from a blank slate - to work with a small, talented, focused team to bring a new idea from whiteboard to market - was too fun to pass up.

I'm going to try to use this blog to track our progress and document what it's like to work for a startup within a multi-billion dollar company. Next post: how we pulled off our "justify your existence" presentation to the executive team (a/k/a "please don't cut our funding"). Also, how Darwinism functions in the ecosystem of a large corporation ... stay tuned :-)

I truly sympathize with the motivations behind this effort. As Xart, the creator of this tool says on the forums

"That is why I am using DAS, to fully protect work that I spent a lot of time on."

Unfortunately, that same exact argument is made by Sony, Universal, Disney, Viacom, and every other media company that wants to use DRM - They want to protect the work that they spent time and money building. (Note: this is a thought experiment, not a defense of the enforcement practices of the RIAA, MPAA, or other body.)

I'd be willing to be good money that Xart and the other folks on the PSP homebrew forums are stridently "anti-DRM". (I put scare quotes there, because in online discussion today, being pro-DRM is like being pro-headaches, or pro-expensive auto repairs. DRM is a bogeyman, and is past being a useful term for discussion.)

The irony is lost on most of the commenters, many of whom simply want to use it to protect their own content:

” So... you mean that we can encrypt our games? Cool! Just like Sony...”

One commenter brings some specific knowledge of security:

[I]f the key is in your program, and the encrypted data is in your program, and the algorithm to decrypt it is in your program, (and all three have to be if you want to decrypt your stuff at any point on the PSP), then anyone with a disassembler (or psplink and gdb) and enough free time can find it, reverse it and alter it any way they like. Security through obscurity is not real security.

Well, there's the rub with any DRM scheme. If you give the end user the program, the key, and the algorithm, you've already defeated your own encryption scheme. (Good references here and here)

I don’t have much more to say – only that we need to re frame the DRM discussion away from that toxic term and the easy to hate corporate monoliths, and focus on the reality – that people, real, warm-blooded, living breathing artists of all stripes (musicians, videographers, PSP firmware hackers) want and need legal and technological tools to protect the value of their unique creations.

I agree with the spirit of "anti-DRM" movements but I can't help but feel that the time and energy should be spent less on being anti-something that's bad, and more pro-something that's better.

[SW: Edited for clarity and typo correction]

There's a bit of corporate apparatchik speak("the great strength, quality, and flexibility of Windows Media should not be limited to PCs only"), but Majidimehr speaks openly about the challenges that Microsoft has faced in moving Windows Media from PCs to home, mobile, and other devices.

One thing that's often lost on web-biased technologists is that each platform on which you want to support your media ecosystem adds exponentially greater complexity, in both technical and business challenges.

When technology companies talk about where media goes, you'll hear the phrase: "One Foot, Three Foot, Ten Foot." This represents the triad of channels/windows through which the majority of people buy, view, and share media: One Foot is your mobile device; Three Foot is your PC; Ten Foot is the big(ger) screen in in your living room.

Solving Web video problems - the Three Foot challenge - is the easiest. As Majidimehr notes, media clients (decoders) can quickly be updated via always-on web connections, so you can rev your codec frequently. Hardware is relatively standardized and usually of good quality and recent manufacture. More cynically, expectations are low - if it "just works", most end users will be content.

However, the other two arms of that triad are much more challenging.

Three Foot
Mobile video means a drastically different business model, working with carriers who control access to media and care about ARPU and little else, and device manufacturers who care about manufacturing and codec licensing costs, runtime footprints, and squeezing every last drop of performance out of a mobile processor. Not to mention that the carriers and device manufacturers get along as well as two Bettas sharing the same tank

Ten Foot
Move to the living room and face a huge installed base of legacy hardware that can't decode or playback your video, MSOs/Telcos/Satellite who need full support for your protocols and codecs throughout their massive storage and delivery infrastructure before they'll even think of deploying, and a dozen different Consumer Electronics manufacturers who need your codecs stable (i.e. frozen for years), widespread, and cheap.

In other words: there's a lot more to bringing a codec to a new platform than just porting the player to a different OS, and I sympathize with the issues that Majidimehr talks about.

One other quote I found too provocative to let slide. In discussing the rise of Flash video, Majidimehr says:

"The biggest factor to that shift is installed market share—Flash is second only to Windows Media player in installed base for web video playback."

Interesting statement. Is that all installed versions of WMP? Does that count multiple installations on the same PC? Are we counting back to the NetShow Player? I would love to see the statistics behind that claim.

There is a difference between "installed base" and "currently addressable base". Argue all you want over Adobe's published Flash Player penetration numbers, but you'd be hard pressed to find many folks doing PC-based streaming media who would not scratch their heads at Mr. Majidimehr's statement above.

This is so great. Words (almost) fail me.

The content – original concert recordings of the pioneers of rock, R&B, soul, folk, jazz – is amazing, complete, and deep. Everything from David Bowie to Devo to Miles Davis.

I’m writing this while listening to Led Zeppelin live at the Fillmore West in 1969 visiting San Francisco during their first foray “across the pond”. The show, a good quality live recording from the sound board, begins with Robert Plant making small talk as Jimmy Page slowly replaces and tunes a busted string (he jokes: “Has anybody got a Les Paul?”). The lack of polish and showmanship is nearly stunning and reminder of how early they were in their legendary careers (Plant introduces the band members one by one); however, the music is pure energy and talent. Beautiful round bass tones, larynx shredding vocals, Bonham’s blistering drums – really a time capsule of a time and place in music history that I, in my relative youth, know only from posters and black and white photos.

The Flash front end to the player embodies much of what has made Flash so successful as a media container. It is, as JD likes to say, a “transparent technology platform” that lets users get to what they want easily and painlessly. The site uses Flash Player 9, so Windows, Mac, and Linux users can all listen in.

As Rob Hall says on his blog:

“The Vault Radio player will even remember what track you left off on intelligently so you can pick up where you left off if you have to quit and come back. Lots of little subtle things we put into the players, like remembering your volume setting and sharing it between the two players, intelligent selection of streams based on bandwidth detection, integration of Express Install, auto-renegotiation of streams in case of drops or low-bandwidth.”

I’ll resist the urge to get into self promoting mode and talk about how great FMS is yada yada, because really, it’s just a tool. It takes talent, art, and vision to create an experience like this. Credit to Rob for building something that resonated so deeply with the users of the Concert Vault – for a real treat, read the comments in the user feedback forums. My fave quote:

I was in front of the stage at the Led Zeppelin concert at Fillmore West.  No one knew who these guys were.  There was mescaline going around the crowd that night.  There was a fat naked hippie older woman also at the front of the stage.  She had a white bed sheet on and would open it up from time to time.  Robert Plant and Page were laughing.  I thought I was going to vomit.  I remember watching Plant sing, and how the light was flickering through his hair.  I thought he had the most beautiful head of hair I had ever seen and that he had a small salami strapped to his leg

Scott Morgan, FMS Support Engineer and jazz studies major, has created a pair of FMS tools to help get you started with or troubleshoot your FMS installation. In his words:

SimpleLive.zip is a demonstration of live publish/subscribe from FMS2. The .zip includes HTML, compiled SWF and FLA source file.

SimplePlayback.zip is a demonstation of streaming playback from FMS2. The zip includes everything you need (compiled Flash SWF and Spark encoded Flash FLV video file) to stream video from FMS and includes Flash FLA source code.

These tools are hosted in an Acrobat Connect meeting room. To download these tools, go to http://fms.adobe.acrobat.com/resources/ and log in as a guest (just put any name in the form field - it's an open room). If you have any questions or issues, please leave a note in the comments to this post.

Great job Scott, thanks.

If you are interested, please leave a note in the comments for this post.

It's from 10am - Noon, with a networking lunch afterwards. I'll be talking about FMS and Flash Video, showing demos, and some tutorials on getting started with FMS. If you're an FMS guru, it will be a bit basic, but did I mention it was free? Lunch, too!

If you're in the LA area, please consider registering and stopping by.

Adobe Wins Emmy Award For Flash Video

Earlier today, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced that Adobe was awarded a Technical and Engineering Emmy in the category of "Streaming Media Architecture & Components" for Flash Video and FMS.

This is a great recognition for the amazingly talented FMS development and QA teams, as well as those in the Flash Player and Authoring groups.

I'll see if we can get "Emmy Award Winning" on the FMS 3 box :-)

Thanks in advance for your ideas!

Update: Graeme Bulls writes:

I'm trying to stay positive here and that we WILL see another version of Flash Media Server. Due to the complete lack of new material about FMS on Adobe's site nor at the huge MAX event in Las Vegas (and other Max events around the world), it's a bit tough .... I have to say though, we (FMS community) have sent tons of opinions and ideas to him, to have to again start from scratch and write them all down is a bit frustrating. I would hope that it wouldn't have been too much effort to say something like "this is what we have received so far," (and list them) "any votes for these items or anything else to add?".

Graeme - thanks for linking back.

Firstly: There absolutely, positively WILL be an FMS 3. However, I can't talk about timeframes at this point. That Im asking for feedback should indicate that we are in the planning stages.

Secondly: We actually did have 5 or so sessions on FMS, though we had next to nothing going on from the Marketing side of things. I'm going to write more about this soon, but Adobe is taking steps to address the underfunding of FMS marketing.

Thirdly: I struggled with posting "ideas so far". Believe me, I've got a long, long list of suggestions from various sources. The FMS team has gone through those, and added many of our own. However, I decided I wanted this thread to be an open suggestion box, with no ideas to predispose anyone - truly a blank slate. Also, it's been several months since I asked publicly for this kind of feedback. In many ways, this thread will be a reality check to see how close our thoughts and ideas over the past year are to what the community wants today.

As (hopefully) more ideas and suggestions come in, I'll break some into their own threads for further discussion.

Owen wroteabout the lack of support show for FMS at MAX. While there were only a few sessions on the product, I was amazed at the diversity of uses showcased - everything from basic streaming media to complex, Flex-based, real time communications applications. I gave two sessions on "Introduction to Flash Media Server" and really enjoyed them. Hopefully those who attended did as well.

What was most fun and educational for me was to try to approach FMS as a beginner would and find what the common missteps and hangups would be. Things like understanding why your "Streams" folder is inside your Instance folder; or why you don't use the ".FLV" in the stream name when calling NetStream.play();.

The learning curve for FMS is pretty steep, and I think we can do better.

In a bit, I'll creatte an FMS.NEXT open thread to gather feature requests and suggestions for future versions of FMS. In the past few weeks, there have been some organizational changes within Adobe that will really benefit the FMS team. We'll have more Dev and QE, resources, more marketing, more training, docs, demos, etc. It will take time, but I believe that Adobe is committed to helping FMS grow.

Above, I wrote about the amazing range of ways in which FMS can be used. I met customers at MAX who use FMS for everything from foreign language distance learning to live cattle auctions. It's an insanely powerful and innovative piece of technology and I don't think we've even begun to see how big it can get. Ever since the Tincan days I've wanted a chance to work with this product team, and I'm now lucky enough to do so, and to do it during a period in which the "perfect storm" of online video, user created content, and real time communications are becoming main uses of the web.

Exciting times ahead.

While this is billed as a two month experiment, it's hard not to be excited about what this means for the future of online video.

I've aggregated a bunch of public feedback on the ABC project, mostly from blogs. Click on the extended entry details for the quotes.

A large number of positive remarks were directed towards ABC, for creating a clean, user friendly experience and not towards the underlying Flash technology – and that’s a good thing. Flash has a tremendous amount of credibility around being a technology that “just works”, and to extend that ability into the notoriously non-working world of streaming video is a great achievement.

The tech savvy crowd was impressed at the quality of the audio and video, and that it worked on browsers/platforms that are traditionally ignored by “Big Media”. The non-techie crowd made several mentions of video that “didn’t need a player” or things to that effect. The transparent platform of Flash video, the message of “you own your brand” is really shining here. In fact, that Flash technology is barely even noticed many viewers spoke volumes to the quality of experience that Flash Video and FMS provides. Even the tough-to-please Slashdot, Digg, and Metafilter crowds were very receptive – again the general theme was a mix of “ABC gets it” and “that’s good quality video – and it works on my Mac!”.

Somewhat surprisingly, given this crowd, the highly interactive Flash ad units that combined audio, video, text, forms, and PDF download received a generally positive response. Again, the attitude of “we don’t mind ads – just don’t insult us with dumb ones”.

----------

http://www.fastboot.com/wordpress/?p=22

“When I heard ABC was going to offer a way to watch their shows online, I was fully expecting it to suck clowns. I figured it would be something sucky like DRM’d wmv streams or real media streams. I am happy to say that they chose Flash Video.

I can’t say enough good things about ABC’s new service. The ui is sexy, the code is optimized, they use new flash 8 features, the backbone is Flash media server, all in all it is the best implementation of flash video i’ve seen in a long time.”

http://www.flashinsider.com/2006/05/01/abc-gets-flash-video-right/

ABC gets Flash video right

Finally someone has taken our advice and started displaying premium content via Flash video with embedded ads. As I have said in this space before, content providers need only create Flash based video content to distribute their stuff to viewers and then they can grab the largest online viewing audience of any video app. Larger than Windows Media Player, larger than Quicktime, larger than all other video types.

---

http://kungfurodeo.com/2006/05/01/abc-launches-free-tv-online/

“whatever video format ABC decided to go with works seamlessly in Safari, so the majority of people viewing wouldn’t have much of a problem, I imagine.”

http://www.paidcontent.org/first-look-abccoms-ad-supported-streaming-experiment

“Initial take: It doesn’t look or feel like an experiment.”

http://ekle.us/index.php?title=abc_full_episode_streaming&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

“I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it works. The video streaming is done entirely inside a browser window, with apparently no special video player required. There were no pauses or other signs of lag in the video. The sound quality and picture quality were both quite good.”

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/05/abc-full-episode-streaming

“This is perhaps the nicest looking Flash video I’ve ever seen. Not only are the video dimensions nice and large, but the picture is extremely clear and not choppy at all. You can tell a lot of work went into the encoding and delivery process. It’s also interesting to note that this is 400k and 700k Flash streaming and not progressive download. Progressive download has been a lot more common than streaming in the past and it’s nice to see such a great example of true broadband Flash streaming in action.”

http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch/archives/003556.html

“I predict that ABC's streaming offering is going to be one of the hotest video sites for UMPCs this year. I just checked it out on my Toshiba M400. The video is wonderful. It's brighter and clearer than that from my Slingbox. “

http://www.digitalbackcountry.com/index.cfm/2006/5/1/Flash-Video-Revolutionizes-Media

Today saw the launch of ABC's Full Episode Streaming and along with it a glimpse of how Flash is going to rock the future of the internet. For a long time "video on the web" has been the next big thing, but it wasn't until Flash came along and showed how easy it could be that people really started taking notice. Flash allowed content providers a way to easily stream high quality video across any platform and nearly any device. Once people realized how powerful this tool was, it was just a matter of time before the big companies picked up on it.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/01/194220

from comments

“Wow. Smooth, fast, works on OSX, little to complain about.
Beats Google video by a mile. Well done.
This is hands down the best no-direct-cost online video experience to date.”

http://www.digg.com/technology/ABC_Launches_Free_Online_Episode_Streaming

many positive comments:

“Now THIS is the future. Watch the hell out cable!”

“i am in agreement with all of these people. when i first heard about the service i imagined a small window like we get on places like Launch Music Videos but no, they actually give us 2 sizes and the "high def" size is actually very nice. next step is adding streaming 5.1 audio and full-screen video. but all-in-all, MAJOR thumbs up ABC!”

“I think I'm gonna try this out .. You guys can wait 2 days for bittorrent to download just so you can watch it on the big screen in your mom's basement.”

“if anyone from abc is reading this. best free streamplayer out rigtht [sic] now.”

“Bravo ABC! At last a TV network listens to the consumers!”

“I know you could pirate the episodes, but it takes hours to download them. I clicked on 'alias' and it was ready to play in about 5 seconds. Almost no lag if you pause and then play again, as well; at least in comparison to streaming real player/ windows media things where you have to wait for it to 'buffer'”

“Good God..It is Mac compatible. Thank you ABC for being one of the few major streaming companies that is Mac compatible. This service is amazing.”

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/51306

many comments focused on the ethics of advertising, and other such navel gazing. However, even among the non-believers, positive comments on the experience.

“I'm impressed, I imagined something much less flexible than their current offering … The video quality is fairly good also, definitely better than iTunes”

“Well, come Thursday, I'll be giving this a shot for Lost. I don't think it's too much to be asked to watch a few ads to see a TV show.”

“take it from someone who has spent some time fiddling with web video and streaming technologies ... I have seen the future and it *is* Flash”

http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/002714.shtml

“There simply isn't another cross-platform, browser-based, video delivery platform that provides this level of user experience or quality in one complete package. And the 16:9 videos look outstanding (I'm sure this will be the first time some non-HDTV owners will see their favorite ABC shows in this format).”

http://blog.hipmojo.com/?p=131

“Interestingly, the entire world is expecting ABC’s parent Disney to emerge as a leader in digital video after its acquisition of Pixar brings Steve Jobs on board.  In fact, many people expected Steve Jobs to start throwing around his weight at Disney.  The decision then to favor flash video instead of Apple’s AVI does suggest that Flash is onto something.”

http://www.randomculture.com/random_culture/2006/05/update_abc_epis.html

“Overall, I'm impressed by how ABC has executed this initiative. It seems for now that they've solved the technical issues from yesterday's barrage of visitors (at least until LOST airs on Wednesday) and the streaming is good quality with intuitive controls.”

http://www.smorty71.com/2006/05/abc-launches-free-streaming.html

Overall, I think the service looks promising. The interface makes it very easy to switch between shows, the video quality is really good and the price is just right. There is just no way I am going to shell out $2 to watch something on my iPod.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/01/abc-launches-free-streaming-experiment/

from comments….

“Totally impressed with the quality! Even glad it sits on a black screen. They really could have flubbed this with animated banner ads all over, but they did it right.”

“I'm very impressed with the quality and speed of this. And the commercials aren't that bad. I like that it gives you a countdown til when the show is back on. I was watching last weeks Alias. Good stuff, ABC. And gotta love that it works on the Mac and makes great use of Flash video.”

http://www.rwjonline.com/index.php/42/welcome-abc-to-iptv

“Thanks ABC for giving consumers a choice in how they get their favorite shows!”

Great use of Flash Video (the new On2 VP6 codec looks great) and Flash Media Server for some of the interactive elements like playlist creation.