Video Breakthroughs

As many of you are aware, we chose Adobe Flash as the media format to stream to Android devices. Doing so provided us with a number of cross platform efficiencies as the same infrastructure can be used for delivery on PCs, Android phones, and set-top boxes.

Adobe's strategic decision to remove support for the Flash Player plug-in meant that we had to change the way that we play back this content.

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We looked at a number of different solutions, for example, Http Live Streaming (HLS) which is used to stream BBC media to other platforms. Unfortunately, HLS isn't supported on Android OS versions prior to Honeycomb.

In the end, Flash was still the best choice of media format for us to use. And the only practical technology for us to play this format back on Android is Adobe Air.

Adobe AIR provides a very attractive abstraction layer for video playback on mobile devices, but a certain level of knowledge is required to take full advantage. Before we start, it is important to understand the difference between Adobe AIR and Flash Player on mobile devices. Flash Player on mobile runs in the browser, and allows to display Flash web content that otherwise wouldn’t be available. The challenge of this approach is iOS does not have Flash support, meaning for reach, mobile sites are not authored in Flash, but rather HTML. Adobe recognized this, and made appropriate adjustments late last year.

Adobe AIR in contrast is based on the application approach, and can combine Flash, HTML and native functionality – as result, it is possible to take advantage of the advanced video features that are widely deployed with Flash on the desktop, including adaptive streaming, content protection, ad monetization and beyond.