Adobe Opens Up Flash Streaming Protocol

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, June 16. 2009 at 04:25 PM EDT 1 comment

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Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) has taken a big step toward making Flash video even more pervasive, by making the streaming protocol it is based on available for free to whomever wants to develop on top of it.

As part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe published the specification for its real-time messaging protocol (RTMP) yesterday. By doing so, the company is allowing anyone to build tools that can send and receive streams in AMF, SWF, FLV, and F4V formats that are compatible with Adobe Flash Player.

While opening up the RTMP spec will allow companies to develop for the Flash platform, it will not include some features, such as adaptive bit rate streaming or DVR-like functionality, that Adobe has built on top of the specification for the latest version of its streaming server, FMS 3.5.

Nor will it include Adobe secure-streaming measures, such as SWF verification or encrypted real-time messaging protocol (RTMPe), that are used to keep pirates from copying premium video content.

"You can't reverse engineer our own content protection," says Ashley Still, group product manager for Flash media distribution at Adobe. "We've never allowed people to create stream rippers for Flash."

The release of the RTMP spec is the latest in a string of moves that the company has made since introducing the Open Screen Project in early 2008. The aim of the initiative is to remove licensing fees and other costs associated with distributing Flash content across multiple devices, which the company hopes will spur even greater adoption of Flash as the go-to technology for online video.

By making the RTMP spec open, Adobe risks losing some revenue and market share from companies that can now freely build streaming servers and other Flash delivery mechanisms that compete with its Flash Media Server (FMS). But it hopes to make up for that with greater ubiquity of Flash as a video source -- and potentially, through greater sales of more Flash creative and development tools, which are the company's real cash cow.

"The more Flash is out there, the more demand you create for the protocol," Still says. "Opening up RTMP streaming will help not just Adobe, but it will allow people to target more devices and more clients."

There are already some competitors that make products that stream video to the Flash Player client -- like Wowza Media Systems , which makes a streaming server that delivers Flash video at a lower cost than Adobe's own FMS server -- but those companies had to reverse engineer the spec to make their products work. Future developers won't have that problem.