Standards at Adobe

This paper was written and presented at the 2005 Yale Law School “Information as Flow” Seminar by Carl Cargill, Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems.  It has since been updated and modified by the author. Link to full paper is here.

Abstract: This paper presents a gloomy review of the current standardization regimes in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector as methods of providing technological governance which are responsive to either social or national needs. Over the last quarter century, voluntary Standards Setting Organizations (SSOs) have become dominated by large multi-national corporations, and have increasingly changed to serve their new masters. This change has had a beneficial side, such as the unfettered creation of the World Wide Web. It also has its darker side, as evinced by the current debate that is raging on the role of intellectual property and standardization. On a positive note, governments are now beginning to comprehend the power of standardization as a tool to help set industrial policy. Unfortunately, there are very few sources of expertise available to the policy makers on the phenomena of voluntary standards setting.  However, the lack of expertise in how to deal with this phenomenon called voluntary standardization has not stopped the need for intervention. It is the contention of this paper that voluntary standardization, absent governmental intervention, will become a balkanizing force in the spread and growth of technology.

I’m Kevin Streeter and I am an architect with Adobe’s Video Solutions organization.  My expertise lies in the area of media formats, streaming and content delivery in addition to DRM and content protection.   I’ve recently joined with others at Adobe to bring new capabilities (many originally pioneered by Adobe)  to the web platform. My particular areas of focus are media delivery and playback.

As part of this effort, Adobe strongly supports the initiative to add optional support for encrypted media into HTML and the web platform. Content creators want to build new and innovative ways for people to enjoy their content within the browser. We support this initiative to get more content, currently only available using Flash, onto the web using HTML5.

The specification from Microsoft, Google, and Netflix is a great start. I’m looking forward to working with the group to ensure that the web platform is able to support a diverse set of media use cases, both for content that is encrypted and content that is not encrypted.

If you’d like to follow the discussion about adding support for encrypted media in HTML, you can start here.

Welcome to the Adobe blog about industry standards in technology and related areas. Over the years, Adobe has developed and participated in a wide variety of industry standards including imaging, fonts, metadata, and documentation. As interoperability between service platforms becomes increasingly important in digital marketing and digital media, we will continue to be involved, participate, and lead where appropriate.

This particular blog is to help give visibility into Adobe’s activities in standards-related areas and to point out interesting currents in the industry that everyone has to navigate. Our hope is that by actively helping to enable interoperability between platforms, we foster an ecosystem of applications, partners, and users that increase the size and utility of the platforms for everybody involved. We look forward to working with you on this!