Adobe Launches Primetime For Television Content Push

Adobe used the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas to officially launch Adobe Primetime, which brings TV content to connected screens.

Adobe Primetime, formerly “Project Primetime,” is an advanced TV publishing and monetisation platform for programmers and pay TV service providers.

Industry Tool

In an 9 April blog post, Stefan Offermann, an Adobe spokesperson, wrote, “Adobe Primetime integrates Adobe’s video publishing, player, DRM, advertising and analytics solutions to help eliminate the complexity of reaching audiences across screens and to create great digital video experiences while also offering new monetisation opportunities for programmers and pay TV service providers.”

“Adobe Primetime will help the industry address the new and evolving video consumption needs of consumers,” said David Karnstedt, senior vice president of Media and Ad Solutions at Adobe, in a statement. “Bringing TV to every connected screen requires broad technology collaboration across the ecosystem, which is core to Adobe’s DNA. With our integrated approach and as a trusted technology provider to the industry, Adobe is uniquely positioned to support and drive this increasing demand in digital television.”

Adobe also announced technology collaborations with dozens of industry leaders, including encoders, cloud platform providers and content delivery networks (CDNs), to pave the way for TV content across every connected screen. Ecosystem partners include Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Elemental Technologies, Envivio, Harmonic, iStreamPlanet, RGB Networks, thePlatform and others. Comcast Cable and NBC Sports Group have signed on as first Adobe Primetime launch partners.

The Adobe Primetime Player is available for Windows, Mac OS, Android and iOS, and will support connected TVs as well as gaming platforms such as Roku and Xbox in 2013.

Content Distribution

Adobe Primetime enables programmers and pay TV service providers to capitalise on the rising consumer interest in watching and engaging with digital video while helping protect and maximise the value of their content. The seamless tie-in with ecosystem partners offers for the first time a highly scalable and reliable solution that can be implemented consistently across devices and platforms. Adobe Primetime’s interoperable components can be deployed individually to fit their infrastructure needs or let the full solution handle the entire workflow.

To help content owners and distributors more efficiently bring more content to more devices, Adobe Primetime provides a single publishing workflow with one video format (HLS) and one DRM solution – all built around the Adobe Primetime Player. By incorporating HLS into the Flash Player for desktops, TV content owners and distributors will be able to efficiently reach more of their audience by deploying one consistent player. In addition, support for broadcast-specific capabilities such as closed captioning, dynamic ad insertion and analytics dramatically helps reduce costs while enabling advertising revenue with a single workflow and fewer video assets to encode, manage, deliver and store. Adobe Primetime will also continue to support HDS streaming.

“Adobe has developed very strong and trusted technology partnerships in the video delivery ecosystem that drive many of the videos watched online today,” said Kevin Towes, a senior manager of business development at Adobe, in a blog post. “It is these partnerships and technologies that make up the ecosystem that enables the future of multi-screen video with Adobe Primetime.”

Towes added that Adobe Primetime is built on a strong foundation of encoding, delivery, playback and protection ecosystem. “Adobe Innovations such as RTMP, H.264, and Adaptive bitrate have enabled the world to engage with video in new ways developed by our customers that challenged how we consumed video,” he said.

“Adobe Primetime was built from the ground up combining many different technologies into one and leverage existing partner solutions so that broadcasters can deliver a robust, rich live streaming or HD video on-demand experience to global audiences. The video industry is undergoing a shift towards standardisation and interoperability, and it is that interoperability that will catapult the volume of video available to consumers.”

The Adobe Primetime Player for mobile platforms can be embedded within apps today while the Adobe Primetime Player for desktop browsers leverages Flash Player. In the latter half of the year, Adobe Primetime will also support HLS as a native format within Flash Player, support more advanced analytics capabilities and support HTML5 within mobile browser environments. Additionally, Adobe Primetime supports a standards-based approach for ad serving making the process of monetizing broadcast video even simpler for both programmers and pay TV service providers.

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