Will Adobe’s ‘Strobe’ light up custom media player development?

Being a big fan of streaming media, I have quite a selection on my desktop from RealPlayer, to Windows Media, to YouTube favourites, to Adobe’s quite interesting Media Player and even Miro. I would have Hulu too if it supported content streaming outside the United States, but as yet that option is still not available.

There is a symposium this week discussing this area of technology in New York called the Streaming Media East Conference and Adobe is using it to talk about its open framework for building custom media players code-named “Strobe”.

They key to any player’s success being the degree to which media companies, content delivery networks (CDNs), publishers and advertising networks decide to ‘embrace’ each format. Adobe’s says its goal is to offer production-ready components to streamline the development process. This, if successful, may help reduce the time content publishers spend creating playback technologies so that they can monetise content rather than focus on the nuts and bolts of video player development.

According to Adobe’s web site, Strobe will incorporate dynamic streaming to help with uninterrupted viewing if and when network conditions change. Also included will be DVR functionality to pause and seek within live video. The product itself is expected to be available, at no charge, in Q3 2009.

It appears that using an open framework, developers can use Strobe software components to incorporate advertising, user measurement tracking and social network integration into their custom media player builds. The concept (or selling point if you prefer) being that the developer will not have to code that functionality directly into the media player.

Strobe’s architectural design provides an extensible platform that enables developers to use only the parts of the framework they need and assemble plug-and-play software components, from Adobe and third-party providers.

Are we are the tipping point of a problem in this space then? As streaming becomes ever more popular and we flock to BBC iPlayer (and ITV too if you’re OK with Silverlight and the advertisements) do we need more standards in place? Of course the answer is almost certainly yes. Is Adobe providing us with a leveling platform that will do this and drive the use of open standards? On paper it looks good, how it looks in cyberspace in the longer term will be interesting to follow.