Flash Media Encoder: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

"The cool thing about this is you can mix both in the same application," Hock continues. "You could have a really high-quality sporting event or concert delivered through a Flash application and then have people doing a webcam chat right alongside."

Because of this, Hock imagines that Adobe’s Connect videoconferencing platform, which currently only utilizes the Spark codec, will eventually expand into the use of live VP6 as well: "I think that the Adobe Connect platform will evolve to use both of the codecs where it makes sense, though I don’t have any firm hard dates or times for when that will happen."

Why Free?
Some might question the business case for offering the Flash Media Encoder for free, but for Adobe the point of doing so is clear when you consider their desire to drive sales of their server. "We wanted to go with a free version just because we think this is a perfect complement for the Flash Media Server," says Hock.

Additionally, in an effort to encourage the migration of webcasters from Windows Media to Flash Video, Adobe realizes the need to prevent price from getting in the way of adoption. "We really want to drive down some of the costs of encoding, so we followed a model that we had already established in our Flash authoring tool where our Flash 8 video encoder was released as a free add-on to the Flash professional product, with the goal of driving down encoding costs," says Hock.

Hock doesn’t rule out the possibility of a future live Flash encoder being a paid-for product, though like not directly from Adobe. "Probably a premium offering will exist, but most likely it will come from other people in the ecosystem," he says.

Of course, there actually already exists a paid live Flash encoding product on the market from On2 called Flix 8 Live for Flash, which licenses for $999 per year, but, as Richter notes, the Flash Media Encoder provides much of the same functionality at no cost.

Building for the Future of Live Flash Streaming
Live, one-to-many Flash Video encoding is still in its most embryonic stages. As such, many of Adobe’s plans for this new functionality revolve around working towards embedding it into the many areas that touch on Flash Video. "Short-term, our plan is to really work with a number of our ecosystem partners. We want to make sure that people who are using different workflows in the market can continue to use those workflows and have them live Flash-enabled," says Hock.