PALO ALTO — The cost of Flash servers, Adobe’s proprietary software which publishers use to stream the majority of video around the globe, has dropped in cost by some 90 percent as Adobe moves to maximize its marketshare, says Jim Guerard, who heads up the Flash business at Adobe Systems.
The initiative, announce late last year, is becoming pervasive with Viacom, CBS, the BBC and others taking advantage of lower pricing, Jim says.
He declared that the "Flash Tax" is history. He says that the cost of Flash today is on par with progressive
download and lower than Windows Media streaming.
He made these
comments at the Beet.TV online video roundtable at Stanford on July
22.
Adobe works with some 20 content delivery networks around the world in
providing Flash streaming, he says. In this segment, he says that
Adobe is moving from a "revenue share maximization" to a "market share
maximization" model.
This sounded like good news to fellow panelist Charlie Tillinghast,
president of msnbc.com who gripes in this segment about the high cost
of Flash streaming. The cost of streaming is a big budget item for publishers. This could be very good news.
Adobe surely has the deep pockets and market share to consolidate its
position. This might be some tough news to the many content delivery networks, CDN’s, who are
basing their businesses on providing http/or progressive download.
As Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media told me, there will be a shakeout coming in the CDN marketplace.
— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
