New media player software released by Adobe

[John Altenmueller]

The software giant Adobe has made another move to expand its reaches by unveiling a new media player program called "Adobe Media Player". And no, Adobe hasn't just created *another* video format for streaming, they're using an existing technology that they already own to handle the video: Macromedia Flash.

The software's supposed to have similar capabilities to Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple's QuickTime software, allowing users to stream live video over the internet, using beefed-up Flash that's higher quality than you're used to seeing.

The player also has some "normal" features that you would expect from a media player. Things such as fullscreen video playback, saving videos to disk, subscribing to video podcasts, and content protection, which is essential if it needs to carry any commercial content.

Public beta software is supposed to be available later this year, with the full version set to be released at the end of the year.

So what could go wrong? Well, there's not too much that can go wrong, especially considering that Flash is already an extremely powerful force in the web development industry, and relied on in sites such as YouTube. Probably the key here is to make it clean, simple, bug-free. Since Adobe doesn't have to focus on trying to bring popularity to the format itself, the player will fit nicely between the gaps that existed previously with Flash and playback.

Apple, Microsoft, and Real have a reason to be worried about the future of their streaming formats.

[cscgal]

I'm happy to see this. I use Flash all the time compared to QuickTime, DivX, etc. which I need to download just for a single purpose.

[TheNNS]

I don't think flash will take over mpeg4, or those high quality formats, so there should be no reason for apple to worry, and real just sucks, never use it. now microsoft needs to to some catching up if they want to stay in the game.