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

"You’ll see us doing things with, for example, hardware encoding vendors like ViewCast and Digital Rapids, who already made a press release at the end of last year on their intent to integrate some of this live technology into their products," Hock continues. "You’ll also see us working with other solution providers that are responsible for doing the services portion of live events, such as OnStream, Multicast Media, and the FeedRoom, to make sure those partners can get up and running with the delivery of live Flash content."

And we should expect to see live Flash Video streaming pop up across all the different platforms Flash touches today and will touch in the future. "Our next step in the strategy to expand live Flash Video will not only be to a webpage but other platforms as well. For example, the next version of Flash Lite will be able to consume feeds from the Flash Media server, so on-demand and live feeds will be available to mobile devices," says Hock. "With our upcoming Apollo platform, we’ve given developers the ability to create playback experiences on the desktop. We saw this live piece as critical to get it up and running to extend to all the different endpoints that the Flash player is exploding to."

Relative Radio Silence
Interestingly, despite the widespread demand for streaming high quality live Flash Video and the potential significance of this release to Adobe’s larger plans for the development of the Flash Video platform, you won’t find a press release on Adobe’s website about this launch, and there were very few stories about it across the Interweb. This relative silence, though, stems not from disinterest but rather Adobe’s focus on the upcoming launch of another highly anticipated product.

"I think from a corporate perspective, one of the things we also have going on is a very big new product announcement coming up around our CS3 product line. From some extent, that is going to be the thrust of what our communications are early in this year," says Hock. But you can expect to hear more about live Flash video as Adobe pulls together additional announcements and customer use cases over the coming months. "We wanted to make sure these stars were aligned before making a big splash around live video. We’ll do more outreach around this later in the year."