Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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