Brightcove Unveils Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, online video platform Brightcove launched its Brightcove Mobile Experience for 
Adobe Flash Player 10.1, enabling easy delivery of optimized video across smartphones running Flash Player 10.1. Those phones include Google Android, Symbian S60, Palm webOS, Windows Mobile and RIM BlackBerry. This announcement is the fruit of Brightcove and Adobe‘s ongoing strategic alliance, announced in April 2009, to collaborate on technology and services to enhance the quality of online video.
AOL, Atlantic Records, La Vanguardia, National Geographic, The New York Times, STV, Sun Media and The Weinstein Company are already taking advantage of the new Brightcove Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1.
Of course the big news here is that Adobe has released a version of its Flash player that’s optimized for mobile devices. As you can see, the list of phones that the Flash player will be available on does not include Apple iPhones. The lack of ability to play Flash media is something that has irritated more than one iPhone user and something that Apple has thus far resisted adding. Apple may not want to play nicely with Adobe, but that Flash player on all those other phones–which makes huge sense in the context of the mobile web since so much Internet content is Flash-based–is a big plus for Android and other phones.
Brightcove is early to the party to make it easy for developers and content creators to take advantage of this new capability. The aim of Brightcove’s Mobile Experience is to enable customers to run content on the mobile platforms with the same fidelity and features as desktop platforms. Features include full support for media player styling, secure multi-bitrate streaming, deep audience profiling and analytics, advertising, and over 120 media player plug-ins and extensions from Brightcove Alliance Partners. The Brightcove Mobile Experience for Flash Player 10.1 includes new Brightcove player templates that offer user interface controls specifically designed for video viewing on compact screens found on leading smartphone platforms. The solution also includes device detection code and best practices for dynamically switching between desktop-optimized and mobile-optimized player templates.
Using hardware-based H.264 video decoding and CPU optimization, Flash Player 10.1 improves mobile video playback performance while reducing system resource utilization and preserving battery life. The Brightcove Mobile Experience solution leverages Brightcove’s cloud transcoding capabilities to deliver mobile-ready H.264 encoded video from any standard format source file. In conjunction with the standard secure multi-bitrate streaming and monetization capabilities of the Brightcove platform, Brightcove hopes to open the door to high-quality long-form content delivery to mobile devices.
“Flash Player 10.1 enables developers and content publishers to deliver rich Web content and applications to mobile users regardless of the device or platform they choose to use,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business at Adobe. “As one of the leading cloud-based online video platforms, Brightcove is perfectly set up to help content providers easily distribute their videos across Flash-enabled mobile devices worldwide.”
The Brightcove Mobile Experience for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 solution, which is a seamless extension to the Brightcove online video platform, is available as an invitation-only beta release. The solution will be generally available later this year and provided free of charge to Brightcove’s global customer base of more than 1,000 media publishers and marketers.
Among the many media companies already using the Brightcove platform for online publishing, Pablo Silva, vice president of global online publishing at Fox International Channels, described what the mobile platform extension will mean for one channel. “National Geographic is all about telling inspiring stories,” he said. “With the Brightcove Mobile Experience solution for Adobe Flash Player 10.1, we’re a step closer to delivering on this promise by publishing high quality, mobile video across multiple devices while still being able to protect, track and monetize our content.”
The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading Web design and development platform for creating expressive applications, content, and video that run consistently across operating systems and devices and reach over 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops. Flash Player 10 was installed on more than 93 percent of computers in just the first ten months since its release. According to comScore Media Metrix, approximately 75 percent of online videos viewed worldwide are delivered using Adobe Flash technology, making it the No. 1 format for video on the Web. Major broadcasters and media companies including Disney.com, MLB.com and DIRECTV rely on the Adobe Flash Platform for delivering video on the Web and the platform powers social network sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
Tags: Adobe, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Android, AOL, Brightcove, Brightcove Mobile Experience, comScore, Flash-enabled mobile devices, H.264 video decoding, long-form content delivery to mobile devices, mobile video playback, mobile video viewing, National Geographic, RIM Blackberry, smartphones, The New York Times, The Weinstein Company
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Content, Devices, Home Feature, Monetizing Mobile.
