BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
09 Apr 2008

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few weeks now, but as a content provider I figured I should shut my trap.

Anyway, Adobe just launched a new video player: “Underneath the hood, Adobe MP is a video RSS aggregator tuned for Flash media”. The navigation reminds me a bit of Joost’s (that’s a good thing), but the integration and ingestion was pretty impressive…

The company has always had an excellent track record in launching - then becoming ubiquitous in - new software segments.

This all the way back to Adobe Reader for PDFs and more recently Flash video. Of course, the entire suite of flash-based applications is something that Adobe inherited after it acquired Macromedia for $3.4B. Flash video really took off after YouTube enabled video embeds and it was only a matter of time before Adobe would think of capitalizing on the popularity of flash video.

Anyway, why I care so much about this is not because I think the industry needs one more player (though with the right bells and whistles, the market is actually ripe and open for a new contestant) but because WatchMojo.com was one of the many partners included…

I was going to mention this in our Q1 recap press release last week, but it was premature. But this past weekend, a few sources such as X, Y began to talk about it and I know that the company is very close to launching… so without any further ado, here is a screen grab of what it looks like.

A cool feature is that you can watch videos even when you’re not connected… more details to come tomorrow, I’m sure, but as a user, I can tell you that this makes Adobe’s player something I would have downloaded anyway…

I’m no techie, but here Adobe is leveraging one of flash video’s inherent advantages: being able to watch them even when you’re not connected to the Web… and with so many videos online being in flash, it will be able to amalgamate a dizzying array of content in a quick manner. How quickly? Well, WatchMojo.com’s entire catalog of 3,500-4,000 published videos are on it.

Here is a sneak preview of our content in the player (with the screen grab):