Adobe Releases Flash Player For Downloadable Video

Today, Adobe announced the immediate availability of version 1.0 of their new Adobe Media Player specifically for content owners looking to make Flash video content playable offline. For Adobe, this is a major move to finally take the Flash video platform offline to allow viewers to consume downloadable Flash based content. As usual with an announcement like this, Adobe also announced a bunch of broadcasters and major content publishers including CBS, MTV Networks, PBS, CondeNet, and Scripps Networks amongst others.

One of the biggest things that Adobe is promoting about the new player is the ability for you to be able search within the player for free content you can to subscribe to and the new features for monetization and branding options. Content owners now have the ability to take downloadable Flash content and include offline advertising, customize the look of the player and collect measurement data of offline content consumption.

I just downloaded the player and have begun to check out some of the content available and so far, the player works as advertised. The one thing I have noticed however is that the quality of the videos are not what I expected. Many of them seem to be encoded at low a low bitrate with a small window size. Since they are not encoded with the same specs it makes the experience very inconsistent in terms of the quality. Not sure if this is the case just because it launched or not but I would think Adobe would want to set some quality standards that content owners would be forced to follow.

Adobe also announced the launch of a new portal called Adobe TV that provides instructional videos for many of the Adobe line of products and contains over 200 videos.