Adobe Media Player - That Connected CE Market Looks More Interesting Now

There have been some interesting comments made on Adobe's announcement yesterday that its Adobe Media Player 1.0 software is not available. There have been some comments made about what this means in terms of competition with Microsoft's Silverlight initiative, and I think you're now seeing the giants such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple all gear up to put together end-to-end ("soup-to-nuts") video publishing, delivery, ad-insertion, and connected CE solutions together.

Will Richmond at VideoNuze has some interesting commentary on the Adobe Media Player announcement today.

Bottom line? The potential for more connected CE announcements that leverage Internet video to provide an over-the-top video-on-demand experience just got more significant. And, the potential is quite large. Our market forecasts for devices such as HDTVs, high-definition DVD players, and game consoles (which will increasingly become more connected and be able to access premium video services) shows annual unit growth of 69 million this year to more than 100 million devices by 2012 (that's a worldwide forecast).

Some other thoughts we have on the Adobe Media Player announcements:

• Adobe has some good premium content partnerships. Yesterday's press release clearly indicates that there is a good amount of it. Granted, many of the titles are the catalog clips of older shows. But, the early experience of Web video has shown that people like the older content such as Airwolf, Battlestar Galactica, and Welcome Back Kotter.
• Would this eliminate the need by a consumer electronics manufacturer to embed a browser (from Oregan Networks or another supplier) into their devices to make them ‘Net-video capable? If so, would this eliminate some cost into creating a Web video-enabled TV?
• Also, eliminating the browser requirement means that content can be stored and played back locally without an Internet connection. So, this opens the opportunity for Adobe to work with a growing number of device manufacturers and expand beyond the PC pretty rapidly, I would think.
  The fact that the Flash can support content scaled as high as 1080p seems pretty significant, especially with TV manufacturers all pursuing connected content strategies.