New Kids in Town: Adobe Media Player and Microsoft Silverlight take online video into new territory

"This is a big step for Adobe, and one that will propel them further in the marketplace," says Christopher Levy, CEO and founder of BuyDRM and a longtime proponent of Windows Media DRM. "Studios and labels and networks generally still require that DRM be applied to their content, and Adobe can now check off this requirement and evolve." He adds that he expects additional developments in Flash DRM to be announced later this year that will "make the Flash ecosystem more like the Windows Media Rights Manager platform."What’s Under the Hood?
Adobe Media Player is based on Apollo, Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime environment that lets web developers leverage Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax to deliver rich internet applications. "Apollo enabled us to develop an application that is playing Flash but also uses HTML in the interface," says Barberich. "That highlights what Apollo is all about, combining those two things in a desktop application. But there’s no reason these same components couldn’t be used inside of a browser, too."

Stefan Richter, a leading Flash developer, echoes the importance of Apollo. "I don’t see Adobe Media Player as the driving force here; instead it is the underlying technology," he says. "Apollo opens the door to applications which may even make Adobe’s own player look thin."

Microsoft Silverlight
At first glance, Microsoft’s Silverlight might seem like the diametric opposite of Adobe Media Player, in that it moves video and rich interactive applications into the browser and away from the popular Windows Media Player. But Silverlight represents more than just a 1MB plugin that supports the viewing of Windows Media Video and Audio along with vector-based graphics, animation, alpha blending, and the like; in other words, it’s a browser plugin that gives Microsoft a direct competitor to Flash.

But Microsoft is touting Silverlight as something much more than that, since it’s based on an expanded .NET framework that enables rich interactive application development and delivery, as well as efficient encoding via the new Expression Media Encoder, which can be paired with a Tarari-assisted hardware accelerator, and faster delivery via Longhorn, the code name for the new Windows Server and the IIS7 Media Pack, which enables bit-rate throttling and improved caching for CDNs.

As such, it’s an outgrowth of a major change in Microsoft’s strategy and corporate culture, says Microsoft's Sean Alexander. "Rather than have a single organization [within Microsoft] thinking about digital media, the entire company needed to think about it," he says, "much in the same way that ten years ago the entire company needed to start thinking about the internet." That Silverlight is coming out of the company’s servers and tools division suggests the degree to which hardware may play a role in the technology’s future.

The Consumer Experience
When users visit a website with Silverlight content, they’ll be prompted to install the plugin; after three clicks, the web page will "light up" with Silverlight, Alexander says. Because it’s not a destination application like Windows Media Player, viewers will see content—whether it’s standard-definition video, widescreen HD video, animation, or any of the other supported mediums—within the browser, including on devices running Windows Mobile. All of this, including 720p HD, was displayed at NAB.

"When you offer media, you want to offer it consistently and cross-platform," Alexander says. "You should also deliver it regardless of browser, using web standards like Ajax for programmability."

If this sounds a little bit familiar, it might be because Silverlight is the outgrowth of Windows Presentation Foundation/Anywhere, which was announced in late 2006. "One of the reasons the code name was that bad was that we wanted to fly under the radar," Alexander says, noting that the intentionally clunky moniker was designed to appeal only to the developer community and not so much to publishers and consumers.

What’s in it for Publishers and Advertisers?
Just because Microsoft was flying under the radar doesn’t mean it wasn’t working behind the scenes to establish partnerships. Partners announced so far include CDNs (Akamai, Limelight Networks, NaviSite, SyncCast), content aggregators and publishers (Brightcove, CBS, Major League Baseball, Netflix), and hardware and software vendors (Sonic Solutions, Tarari, Telestream, Winnov). (More on the hardware connection later.)