Streaming Media - June/July 2008 - (Page 41) 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 WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 41 http://www.digital-rapids.com http://www.digital-rapids.com http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
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