Adobe Spells Out the Three Points of its Media Server Roadmap
The recent Streaming Forum conference in London was the place to be to find out what's coming next in media server technologies. In one popular panel, representatives from Adobe, CodeShop, Microsoft, RealNetworks, and Wowza gave a sneak peek at their product roadmaps. For Adobe, the map has three parts.
"We continue to expand in three areas, really," explained Steve Allison, technical evangelist for strategic alliances at Adobe. "Firstly, we continue to push up and down the food chain in terms of the servers. So, more and more now you'll start to see the media server actually being deployed either at the encoding level or the cloud level rather than as a separate infrastructure that people would maintain themselves."
HLS also plays an important part in Adobe's plans.
"Secondly, we have altered our player strategy," Allison said. "Some of you may have heard that we're in the process of supporting HLS directly in the Flash Player on desktops. We've also rewritten the Flash's video capability as a native set of components now for use on other devices.
Adobe Primetime, which combines TV Everywhere publishing, advertising, and analytics, is also an important driver.
"The third area where we're concentrating on now, and this comes under the Primetime branding that we've bought out, is much more closely integrating our streaming and player technologies together with the other elements of business, i.e. advertising and analytics. So we can get proper stats, proper coordinated stats, out of that system and have that as part of a monetization strategy with much better integration with ad servers and other technologies," Allison said.
To hear what the other panelists had to say, watch the full discussion below.
Media Server Application Trends
What’s coming next in server technologies from Adobe, CodeShop, Microsoft, RealNetworks, and Wowza? A rare chance to see where vendors are diverging and converging on new technologies from DASH and HEVC to DRM, plus a look ahead.
Moderator: Tim Siglin, Co-Founder, Transitions Inc — USA
Arjen Wagenaar, CTO, CodeShop — The Netherlands
Xavier Pouyat, Senior Program Manager, Windows Azure Media Services, Microsoft Corporation — France
Steve Allison, Technical Evangelist, Strategic Alliances, Adobe Systems — UK
David J Smith, Director Global Partner Platform, Real Networks Ltd — UK
Chris Knowlton, VP, Product Management, Wowza Media Systems — USA