JD on EP

Disclaimer: I'm not on the AMP team, and don't speak for them... what follows are my own observations after watching for awhile. You'll get more direct info from Deeje Cooley than me.

Journalists have been the funniest... the words "Media Player" in the name seem to have triggered storylines like "Adobe enters crowded media player market" and "AMP vs Windows Media Player vs Real Media Player" and so on. Why would anyone want to do that!

QuickTime was the first real digital video architecture, and it started up a few years before web browsers did. Then Microsoft, of course, tried to emulate and kill QuickTime with its own video solution. Progressive Networks (Real) started about the time browsers did, first serving audio, and later video. All of these eventually acquired some presence in web browsers, but generally within a MS-branded window, or Apple-branded window, or Real-branded window. In the last few years in-browser Flash Video just got out of the way and let content creators own the contact with their audiences, with no obtrusive branded window. Flash became successful by letting go.

Adobe Media Player "gets out of the way" slightly differently, but still emphasizes a direct communication between content creator and content consumer. To use Apple's video catalog people have to buy from Apple's store -- Apple owns the relationship with your viewing audience, not you. Google wants to sell advertising into video streams, and doesn't particularly respect the needs of video creators -- they own the audience eyeballs, and you're just a talented sharecropper. As usual, Microsoft wants to own it all, producing their own content to compete with mainstream producers, owning the ad network, the servers, even the video runtime. Adobe Media Player doesn't have those conflicts of interest... it's more a video publishing platform than an advertising or membership service... video can come from any server, and the video creator can brand the engine, and the viewing audience can subscribe to shows which never appear in Adobe's own catalog.

The old game of Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes Store and "owning the audience" isn't very interesting to me. The people who create video messages should interact directly with their audiences, without intermediaries. Seeing journalists reflexively go to a "War of the Media Players!" storyline makes sense rhetorically, but not when you actually look at what these different generations of "media player" attempt to do. We need to look at where video can go, not just where it's been.

Enduser perspectives generated a good amount of varying commentary... "What can this Adobe Media Player do for me?" There were two very different types of experience levels described in these conversations:

• Some looked at the Adobe catalog as they would a television channel guide, and compared the participating production studios to those of other video solutions. AMP is new, but the charter partners are pretty high-profile, and even at this early stage they were impressed. But that's only a part of what AMP can do.
  
• More advanced users looked beyond the catalog, to using AMP as a one-stop shop for all their web video needs. This is still a hard problem, because of the diversity of video codecs found among web video today. AMP works exclusively with Flash Video, whether Sorenson or On2 or H.264. Miro is probably the closest to being a "universal video decoder", but as you can tell from the FAQ and support forums, predictable viewing is still not assured. The sketchiness of early "RSS" and "podcast" architectures makes for a confusing situation today when subscribing to video content: you have to check the encoding to make sure you can decode it.
  

Anyway, entry-level audiences see AMP as a catalog-driven service, and more accomplished audiences see it as a way to manage Flash video from anywhere on the web. They each have their own initial perception of how AMP can be used... a tale told from two different perspectives. I believe we don't see its full usage yet: as a way to manage your own viewing of Flash video.

(One caution to some of the people focusing on broadcast television titles... geo-restrictions are set by policy files created by the content distributors, not Adobe. I don't think many video providers have implemented this yet. Some commenters were excited by seeing shows they can't ordinarily get, but that relationship with the audience is owned by the provider, not by Adobe, and may change with time.)

But then there are the video creators. They see AMP quite differently, and this difference will eventually drive how AMP is used.

Adobe Media Player is more than just viewing and aggregation. There are advertising features, which help support production costs. There are branding features, so that your section of each user's catalog can appear as you intend. There are rights-management features, to accommodate time-restricted, geo-restricted, or user-restricted viewing. There are metrics features, so that you can measure how your audience responds to your video.

This changes the game dramatically. I'm not prepared to discuss all the business angles; I don't know enough. But I do know that we need additional models beyond "If you love it let it go"... people like to watch that big-budget video content, and the people who make such desirable content like to get paid. AMP enables a diversity of contractual agreements between creator and consumer.

I don't think this problem has really been solved before. There have been service-specific clientside applications, and OS-specific rights-management techniques, but I don't know of any video initiatives which work across such a range as Adobe Media Player. Now, if more big movie/television companies had individual weblogs, we'd probably know more on how they think about this today, but I suspect it's a significant advance.... ;-)

There's another group of stakeholders here. That's people creating applications, rather than video. For them, Adobe Media Player is a way of increasing the number of machines out there which already have the Adobe Integrated Runtime installed. This means they can distribute their own applications at very, very little cost to the audience... sending just a set of instructions, rather than asking them to install the runtime first.

There's another, subtler group of stakeholders... those within Adobe. Adobe made a big investment in Macromedia, then made another big investment with the AIR work. As with Digital Editions, and Photoshop Express, and Kuler and Labs and all the rest, the company sees this new technology as creating a bedrock publishing platform upon which other work can be built. The investment in time, skill, and relationships to make Adobe Media Player illustrates how important these new abilities are to Adobe itself.

Anyway, those are some of the perspectives I've been trying to digest over the past few days. Reporters see drama based on semantics... novice users and advanced users see AMP as two different types of applications... video developers have incentives that were very difficult to realize before... and the very popularity of AMP helps build up other aspects of the entire platform. Different people see Adobe Media Player differently. Time will show the fuller picture, I'd bet.

Copyright © 2009 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Use of this website signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use and Online Privacy Policy (updated 07-14-2009).