It's All in the Delivery: A Look at the Top Video Players of Today and Tomorrow

Adobe has also lacked a robust DRM and offline media player, a problem it corrected recently with its announcement of the Adobe Media Player, which was created with AIR, and the Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server. Adobe is also aggressively supporting open platforms and standards to improve its leadership in the space. It recently announced support for H.264 and has an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux.

Adobe states that, unlike other companies in the space, it sees support for both of these open technologies as crucial. "We take a passionate approach to reliability across operating systems," says Phil Costa, director of product management for the platform business unit at Adobe. "Microsoft has yet to prove that cross-platform is important to [its business], and [it’s] not really motivated to do that because Windows is a big part of [its] business currently."

Adobe is being very innovative in enhancing its technology, and if consumers welcome the company’s approach, its leadership in video playback technology may significantly increase. For example, the company’s new Adobe Media Player tightly integrates Really Simple Subscription (RSS) technology to help consumers automatically find content they want online. "If HTML is equivalent to going down to the local store to buy a magazine, then AIR [and AMP] is equivalent to having that magazine delivered to your doorstep," says Deeje Cooley, a senior evangelist for the dynamic media organization at Adobe. "We saw that as an interesting trend. We also saw the growth of VOD growing 30% last year."

Adobe also emphasizes that it won’t venture out and create an online consumer initiative similar to Apple’s iTunes, Real’s Rhapsody, or Microsoft’s Zune. "We are not controlling the business model, which has made content companies very nervous," says Ashley Still, senior product manager for the Adobe Media Player. "The content companies have been watching the music space unfold, and I think they have learned a lot of lessons and they want to do things differently."

Adobe’s technology is new and, in many areas, unproven, but the company has taken great care to make sure its early releases are mature and stable. Only the market will be able to judge how well Adobe has met its quality goals. Even so, if you are looking for an open platform that has wide distribution and a lot of support among the creative and developer communities, and you are willing to pay a bit more than you might with alternative solutions, then this is your platform, even though it's unproven in some key areas.

QuickTime
If you have a lot of programming capabilities and need a low-cost, dependable streaming and offline playback solution, Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server is a great open source solution. Apple’s player is also free, and there are many tools that you can use to encode and edit QuickTime content.

Apple has been a huge advocate and promoter of the H.264 standard. Without Apple’s support and efforts backing it, this format would not be the open standard it has become today. You don’t even need the QuickTime player to play back H.264 video anymore, as many companies, such as Adobe, are now supporting the format. Apple is also driving the world’s leading music and video download service, iTunes, and many partners are using the Darwin Streaming Server to power smaller and different consumer applications.

The QuickTime platform supports both HTTP and RTSP protocols, which is very important. QuickTime’s Darwin Streaming Server also supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. However, one major drawback is that QuickTime doesn’t support RTSP streaming of Windows Media content. You can use Adobe’s new AIR technology for building rich media experiences using Apple’s streaming servers, but Apple doesn’t have its own RIA environment, something Adobe and Microsoft are investing in. Apple has also recently become very insular about its streaming and VOD technologies without providing any reason. For now, the company seems content being the quiet giant in the space.

RealNetworks
If you listen and/or watch content over the internet, you can thank RealNetworks for pioneering the technology back in 1995. However, if you talk to many folks in the streaming media industry, they will tell you that Real’s product offerings have become stale and insignificant. Although this might be the current perception, it doesn’t accurately represent the state of the company’s technology and accomplishments. "Real’s mission is to provide digital entertainment to consumers whenever and wherever they want, and while some of the ways they do that are better known to consumers [like Rhapsody, RealArcade, RealPlayer], the company continues to innovate and evolve as the way people consume media evolves [PC to mobile]," says Sally Julien, a spokesperson for the B2B division of RealNetworks.

Real’s technology and services power some of the largest broadcast initiatives on the web today. The company’s media division makes more than $100 million a year from Rhapsody and its other online initiatives, and it makes an equal amount in licensing its technology. The company also recently announced the purchase of the online game distribution company Trymedia from Macrovision. Much of Real’s recent growth has come from delivering content to mobiles phones and distributing games. And revenues for the company were up 44% to $567 million for 2007.That said, licensing revenue increased by only a meager 2%, as the company is clearly more focused today on building consumer-facing solutions with and for content and consumer electronic companies than it is on supporting CDNs and developers with its technology. But that doesn’t mean that Real’s technology is stale.

If Apple is the quiet giant in the space, Real is the sleeping giant. It has made nice with Microsoft, has battle-proven its technology by streaming content (such as the reality TV show Big Brother and running the Rhapsody music download service), and has the only technology that supports RTSP streaming of H.264 and all other major streaming formats, including Windows Media. (It doesn’t support Flash, but since Adobe now supports H.264, it can support the Flash player.) The company’s solution is expensive, but Real also offers to stream your content for you via the Real Broadcast Network. So if you have the cash and you want or need a solution with battle-proven technology that easily supports all major media formats, Real may be the only game in town.

Other Things to Watch
Evolution of Video Delivery Networks
Move Networks doesn’t provide any technology you can license—yet. Instead, Move is a new breed of company that I like to refer to as a video delivery network (VDN). Move’s technology is powering ABC’s streaming video initiative, and the company has a host of other notable clients. Its technology breaks streams into what the company calls "streamlets" through a process it calls "Simulcoding." The process is innovative and is able to securely deliver high-quality streams to the user’s PC. Move is well-funded and has recently partnered with Microsoft to develop a Silverlight player, which was demonstrated at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference this past April. However, the company’s technology relies heavily on HTTP, which embeds some technical restrictions that may make Move vulnerable to other emerging technologies.

Digital Fountain is another company that fits into the VDN category. The com