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<img alt="Flashicon" title="Flashicon" src="http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/flashicon.jpg" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" />The National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas is in full swing this week and Adobe has kicked things off by [announcing a new media player][2] for Windows and Mac desktops. The Adobe Media Player is a standalone desktop version of Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player browser plug-in.
Adobe Media Player is built on the recently released [Apollo platform][1] and is expected to launch in a beta test phase later this year with the final version (which will also support Linux) arriving by the end of 2007.
With Adobe's Flash Player 8 sitting at roughly 94 percent market penetration and the latest version, Flash Player 9, climbing about 20 percent a month, there's no doubt that Flash video is a dominate force on the web. Adobe is hoping to translate its browser success into desktop success.
Adobe Media Player will be going up against Windows Media Player and incorporates similar DRM-based content locks as Microsoft's media player. Adobe's press release mentions "content publishers" no less than five times in eight paragraphs and the company is clearly trying to position the DRM "features" as a positive move.
Adobe Media Player does boast some impressive built-in features like RSS subscriptions, on and offline playback, on-demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download, and protected download-and-play. But it's that last one that might leave consumers flinching.
The Adobe Media Player has two elements that will appeal to content producers, but might leave consumers with some doubts. The first is a mechanism that will allow advertising to be embedded in downloaded clips in such a way that it can't be separated from the content.
The second element is a "security" model (DRM) that will tie downloaded content to specific machines or users.
While both options are solely at the discretion of the content producer, a lack of DRM features in the Flash browser plugin is arguably one of the reasons for its success and by adding DRM to the desktop client Adobe may well be shooting itself in the foot.
On the brighter side Adobe has also announced improved video fidelity for the Flash video format, though details are few at the moment.
With Microsoft announcing Silverlight (a Flash competitor -- more on that in a minute) nearly simultaneously, Adobe and Microsoft are set to go head to head over on/offline video.
[1]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/03/adobe_launches_.html "Adobe Launches Apollo"
[2]: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200704/041607AMP.html "Adobe Media Player"
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