Adobe poised to take media player market from Microsoft

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 06:52

Opinion and Analysis

In case anyone hasn't noticed, two announcements, one from Microsoft and the other from Adobe, has marked the beginning of a war over what technology consumers will user to play back videos on their computers. This is a war that will be difficult for Microsoft to win.

In a nutshell, Adobe intends to take its ubiquitous Flash technology widely used to play video in web browsers and enable users to download videos to a Flash player on their desktops. What's more the desktop player will provide superior quality video to what users are currently gettting in their browsers, including full screen video.

But wait there's more! The new Adobe Media Player, currently on show at the NAB 2007 expo, will enable content producers to embed advertising in downloaded videos, thus enabling them to monetize and protect the value of copyrighted content.

So what has Microsoft got to offer? A new browser-based video technology called Silverlight that it believes can outshine Flash (forgive the pun - there have been so many). It is a competing technology but it's not a paradigm shifter or market disrupter

The way I see it Adobe would appear to have the upper hand here. On the web, Flash absolutely dominates. It is the video technology already used on the world's most popular social networking sites YouTube and MySpace, among others, and it's a proven technology most developers are comfortable with. There is an increasing demand from consumers to be able to download videos from the web to the desktop for offline viewing and to do that they will need a Flash desktop player. Thus, the market is there for Adobe media Player.

Now what has Microsoft got to offer with Silverlight? In essence, an alternative browser based video player format to Flash. To be sure it is compatible with the three most widely used browsers but Microsoft has to build the market by convincing web publishers and content developers to use its technology instead of Flash. Where is the incentive for that?

Microsoft can talk until it is blue in the face that Silverlight is superior technology to Flash. The fact is, however, that Flash has a dominant market position and all the momentum. As would-be competitors to Windows can attest, those factors are hard to overcome.