New Media Players

Rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft heats up as the two mega sized organizations announce new products aimed at improving the online video experience.

Microsoft has dominated the video player market with its Windows Media Player application, bundled with Windows since its introduction. The EU Commission was not happy with this and recently forced the software giant to offer its Windows OS in the EU area without Windows Media Player.

Adobe is now challenging Microsoft’s domination with [tag-tec]Adobe Media Player[/tag-tec], which was recently announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2007 trade show.

Already owner of the popular Flash player which powers successful Internet start ups like YouTube, Adobe makes a step further into the video solutions market adding new ways to distribute and monetize media, while at the same time helping users to discover and view high-quality media content both online and offline.

Adobe continues to be an industry leader in their approach to innovation by delivering new ways for audiences to experience rich, interactive content.

“Adobe Flash has revolutionized the distribution of video content across the Internet and Adobe Media Player builds on this leadership position,” said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer at Adobe.

For content publishers, Adobe Media Player enables better ways to deliver, monetize, brand, track and protect video content. It provides an array of video delivery options for high-quality online and offline playback, including on-demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download, and protected download-and-play. The Adobe Media Player enables a wider selection of monetization and branding options including viewer-centric dynamic advertising and the ability to customize the look and feel of the player on the fly to match the brand or theme of the currently playing content.

Adobe Media Player is developed using Apollo, the code name of Adobe’s recently announced application runtime. Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

To compete against this new introduction, Microsoft has just announced what is called the Redmond Flash Killer, a scalable video player technology dubbed Silverlight which allows for HD content to be viewed inside Web-browsers like Mozilla, IE7 or Safari, but with far greater customization and interactivity possibilities than its rivals.

So, exciting times ahead with better content presentation for the audience. It will be interesting in the months ahead to see which products proves more successful and popular.