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):
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April 9th, 2008 at 11:36 am
i disagree that i will be a hit. i’ve seen the demo of the software and read most of the articles about it but i don’t think it’s going to be a hit by itself.
in my opinion one way that it would make this software popular like Flash is to make it integrative with other softwares and sites, which is something adobe is not known for. lets face it flash was done by macromedia and they made tools to be integrated with other sites and that’s how flash became so successful, but adobe wants everything for itself, it’s greedy in that way and the single biggest reason why it will not succeed.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:53 am
I’ve actually long argued that companies are being greedy by pushing their own player… but that is due to Google envy and they desire to become the eventually dominating platform for video.