Adobe’s Media Player, video-to-text editing

Cory Bergman April 14th, 2008

There are some interesting new video products Adobe unveiled here at NAB. With the official launch of Adobe’s Media Player 1.0 (review) — a hybrid desktop/internet application that lets you subscribe to video feeds via RSS (and even watch them offline) — the company is expanding outside the traditional realm of a software company. While many traditional media companies have pushed content to the Media Player, Adobe has opened its door for smaller publishers with an advertising revenue-share model. “We don’t make money if you don’t make money,” said Ashley Still, Adobe’s product manager for the video player, at an interview at NAB this afternoon. Still said the idea is to reduce the upfront cost for smaller publishers.

Adobe’s Mark Randall, who’s the company’s chief strategist for dynamic media, said that video metadata will fuel many innovations over the next several years. At NAB, Adobe announced a video-to-text application that works right in the editing workflow. “It literally builds a trascript while editing,” he said. “You can edit on the words and search for words.” Randall said Adobe is working on extending its XMP standard from print to video. Too much rich media is “opaque,” Randalls said, which limits its distribution, consumption and monetization. (Thanks to Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser for letting me muscle in on the Adobe interviews. You can see the video version on Beet.tv tomorrow, as well as Andy’s interview of me.)