Adobe Systems is revamping its Media Player with a new interface and a deal that will let users of the software watch movies from Sony Pictures.
The home screen on the new Adobe Media Player 1.1 presents more shows to watch with a new interface.
(Credit: Adobe)The interface update in the new version 1.1, due to ship Tuesday afternoon, presents users with a larger number of video shows. "There's more content that we surface earlier," said Ashley Still, senior product manager for Adobe Media Player.
The new Sony partnership means people will be able to watch full-length movies, including Jerry Maguire and Men in Black, on Adobe Media Player, she said. A total of about 600 shows and 25,000 individual episodes are available. Users can browse various content categories, selecting some as favorites, or subscribe to their own video feeds via RSS, Still said.
Also new are full-length episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, 48 Hours, The Love Boat from CBS, which expanded the content already available through its existing partnership with Adobe. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
Content providers get free access to the player, and can control whether the content is available only in streaming format or can be saved onto a person's hard drive, as in the case of Epicurious shows, Still said. Content providers show what ads show and whether they're in the frame around the content or in the content itself, and the technology lets them embed ads that can't be skipped over, Still said.
Adobe takes an undisclosed fraction of the advertising revenue.
Shows can be encoded in the Flash video format, called FLV, or in H.264. The Adobe Media Player uses Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a programming foundation that lets software run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. Adobe Media Player, though, works only on Windows and Mac OS X, Adobe said.
Update 10:40 p.m. PDT: I can confirm that Ghostbusters, from Sony Pictures, is in fact available. It's broken into eight chunks, each from 7 to 15 minutes long, and the end of the first chunk has an advertisement. The screen resolution isn't fabulous, but you can at least click a full-screen button that cuts away the clutter, and you can scrub back and forth.
Later this month, Adobe will release out of beta the AIR-based Adobe Media Player that we first saw at the Web 2.0 Expo a year ago. It's a very attractive video player, needing only a more complete catalog to become a compelling product. (See the product manager's pitch and demo at the end of this post.)
As with many AIR programs, AMP is a hybrid online/offline app. If you use it while you're connected to the Net, it will download the media you're subscribed to in the background, allow you to play streaming-only files, and let you browse the AMP catalog of media. When you're offline, you're only able to watch all your downloaded files.
Many video players have gone here before.
Being an Adobe product, the player is primarily a platform for Flash videos. To compete technically with other video sites, it displays videos in up to 1080p resolution. And the interface is slick and simple.
When you want to sign up for content, there are nice TiVo-like options. For example, you can select "catch up" to start downloading a season of a show you've missed from the beginning, or you can have it show only the most recent shows.
Content publishers keep a lot of control. They're the ones who decide if their media can be downloaded to your computer or only streamed, when the media expires, and if it can be transferred. Publishers can also place ads on or around video files, and they can even send current advertising messages to run with videos that may have been sitting on a hard disk for a year already. Publishers can also direct the player to adopt skins or themes when specific media plays. Adobe keeps a portion of advertising revenues.
AMP gives you flexible fetching and saving options.
The focus on advertising sets AMP apart from iTunes, which is sales-based. Adobe will likely offer paid content subscriptions and purchases in the future, however.
AMP competes with Joost, another video service that works offline (news). As of this writing, Joost has a larger video library, although Adobe has clout that will likely help it narrow the gap.
I see AMP as a competitor to Hulu (related stories), although Adobe's Ashley Manning Still, who demonstrated the product for me, considers Hulu--an online-only Flash-based player--as complementary or perhaps a partner. But since both AMP and Hulu are competing for the same advertising revenues, I'd say that puts them at odds.
Missing from AMP, until some time in 2009 or 2010, is "multiscreen" capability--inherent support for portable media players and set-top boxes. Meantime, just hook your AMP-running laptop up to your TV. As mentioned earlier, it displays true HD video. No YouTube blockiness here.
If you want to try AMP, you can get the beta now at Adobe Labs, but you need the old beta version of AIR (also on Labs). If you want to try the shipping version, which works with the current 1.0 version of AIR, wait until later this month when AMP makes its way to Adobe's shipping download page.
Either way, do try it. It's both a good streaming player and a strong client for subscribing to and watching downloaded Flash videos.
[Note: This post has been updated with a video taken from today's keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo, to see it click the 'read more' link at the bottom of the post]
Today Adobe announced their new Media Player, a multi-platform, online-enabled application that runs on Adobe's Apollo framework. Along with a full featured desktop media player for Flash files, Adobe plans on including a themed online music store like Microsoft's XBOX Live Marketplace where people can purchase music and movies.
Adobe Media Player will join the bevy of online music and media stores like iTunes, Napster, Urge, Rhapsody and others. Like the competition, Adobe is using DRM, both for downloads and streaming media to secure purchased content.
There's no word when the service will be available, but expect details and partnerships to emerge as Apollo develops.
From their keynote presentation today, we also got a sneak peak of Buzznote, a collaborative word processor that runs off the Apollo framework.
Our early hands-on with Apollo can be found here. And to see a video of the app in action, keep reading.
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