Adobe Systems has announced the Adobe Media Player at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show. This desktop application expands Adobe’s Internet video solutions, adding to an emerging ecosystem that enables new ways to distribute and monetize media. Leveraging Adobe's Flash architecture, the Adobe Media Player delivers more engaging video experiences to viewers while offering content publishers new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets.

For viewers, Adobe Media Player enables higher quality Flash format playback, the ability to download and view videos offline, ways to discover interesting new shows, full screen playback, one-click viewer ratings, and a powerful Favorites feature that automatically downloads new episodes of favorite TV shows or video podcasts. The player is cross-platform, based on open standards—including RSS and SMIL—and brings viewers the ability to play the Web's most popular video format outside of their browser.

The technology provides content publishers a standardized toolbox to deploy a variety of new advertising formats, and to compile permission-based analytics data, both online and offline, to better understand their audiences. Building on Adobe's history of document protection technology, Adobe Media Player plans to offer content publishers a range of protection options, including streaming encryption, content integrity protection and identity-based protection.

Adobe Media Player is a key part of Adobe's emerging ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next generation Internet video. It complements and leverages other Adobe components including Adobe Flash Player, the newly announced Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Flash Media Server 2, server software for streaming media applications, Flash Lite mobile video playback technology, Adobe's range of media authoring tools such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium for video, audio and motion graphics production and Adobe Media Encoder for compression and live streaming.

Adobe Media Player is developed using Apollo, the code name of Adobe’s recently announced application runtime that empowers content publishers and web developers to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop using technologies such as Flash, PDF, and HTML.

Adobe Media Player is planned to be available as a free beta download from the Adobe Web site later in 2007 with full availability expected by the end of the year, from Adobe and a wide range of media and technology partners.