Adobe Media Player Makes Online Video Profitable

Adobe on Wednesday launched its Media Player 1.0 software that leverages the company's Flash technology and can support media with full-screen HD resolution. The product aims to help its customer partners create and deliver content at a profit.

Users can watch video from a variety of sources, including video podcasts, either online or offline. Adobe partners include CBS, Comedy Central, PBS and Nickleodeon among others. Episodes of "classic TV" are also available, such as the series Hawaii Five-O, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Adobe is effectively moving content-protected video off the browser and onto its AIR platform.

If users want new episodes of their favorite shows automatically downloaded to their computers, they can opt to subscribe to that service online. For the viewer, the player offers convenience; for the partner, the player offers control.

The bane of media companies' existence has been digital recorders, such as TiVo, which allow viewers to watch programming at their convenience (a practice called "time-shifting") and to skip through commercials, which is how the networks make money. If fewer people are watching commercials, advertisers will demand to pay less, reducing profits for media producers. Figuring out how to monetize new media approaches to watching old media -- such as TV shows -- has plagued the entertainment industry.

However, what digital recorders do not offer is flexibility in where viewers watch what they've recorded. Because that plasma television isn't exactly portable, a viewer must be where the DV-R is to view programming. Adobe's Media Player offers a mobile solution -- and also allows the context and format to be entirely dictated by the content provider. Commercials can be inserted or deleted at the content provider's discretion. Adobe Media Player can be downloaded at Adobe.com.

The company also launched Adobe TV, a channel aimed at providing users of Adobe applications instructional programming.