Adobe Media Player 1.0 goes live with clear, high-def content

[portfolio_slideshow id=28215]The Flash manufacturer's move at taking content-protected video off of the browser and moving it onto its AIR platform, no longer has the luxury of being able to excuse any remaining bugs.

It could soon become one of the most ubiquitous examples of the AIR platform in popular use: Adobe today formally published its Adobe Media Player 1.0 software, which is designed to be both a delivery system and stand-alone console for Flash video, including high-resolution media.

During the product's beta period of almost exactly one year, it had already obtained official partners -- including CBS, MTV Networks, and NBC/Fox joint venture Hulu -- which began using the non-release version anyway as an alternate delivery platform for their shows. So the player was already receiving widespread attention even during a time when it wasn't exactly clear to partners what they should call the player.

What's becoming clear to them only now is that there are two products: Adobe Flash Player, which runs from a Web browser, and Adobe Media Player which runs on the AIR platform whose 1.0 edition went live last February.

The unique selling point of Adobe Media Player (AMP) for partners such as CBS is its ability to display content outside of the Web browser, in a context and format that can be entirely defined by the content provider. That definition includes the capability of controlling the advertising channel that sustains that provider's source of revenue.

"With Adobe Media Player, you can take advantage of built-in advertising and branding tools, including banners, in-rolls, and bugs," reads a promotional brochure to prospective partners updated this morning (PDF available here). "Use Favorites badge links from your website to automatically add your shows to a viewer's Favorites, when requested. Customize your own network: create multiple shows with specific branding, contextual advertising, and robust reporting - helping ensure the best value for advertisers."

Just as for Flash, partners using AMP will be urged to direct users to Adobe's Web site to download the component directly. Though it's only a 1.4 MB download, it's dependent upon the AIR platform, whose installation routine is triggered by AMP's installation automatically. By comparison, Microsoft's Windows Media Player doesn't have the virtue of automatically installing Silverlight -- which competes with the AIR platform -- because the two components are not inter-dependent upon one another. Such an interdependence, if it existed, could conceivably spur Silverlight installations...as well as trigger the requisite skepticism of Microsoft's motives.

A check of Adobe Media Player's 1.0 functionality this morning shows it does contain access to some unquestionably essential content, such as all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek in their uncut and unaltered form. Though a "pre-roll" ad did precede one episode we checked out, not all the prepared commercial break points inserted back in 1966 were filled with ads, though some were. The fast-forward/rewind scroll bar was surprisingly operational, letting viewers skip not only through scenes at will but also right over the ads.

Streaming was appreciably quick, with the entire episode downloaded over our Comcast connection in about a minute. In our tests, we did notice AMP was confused a bit by our ZoneAlarm Pro firewall. While ZAP was set up to not trust AMP automatically without asking first, ZAP's periodic asking for permission to pass AMP through the Internet (every five minutes) would result in AMP resetting its playback position on the episode to the very beginning. The previously retrieved material was still in memory, however; and the problem was resolved by setting ZAP to trust AMP implicitly.

Our test was limited to film content that was scanned for traditional, low-resolution analog video at 480 lines interlaced. It will be interesting to see how well the delivery system and console hold up under the pressure of multiple providers pushing 720p and 1080p (progressive scan) high-def content all at once.