September 10, 2009, 8:35 AM — Adobe Systems is renaming Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, which controls access to streams of rich media content, to Adobe Flash Access and adding capabilities to control downloaded Flash content.
Adobe Flash Access 2.0 is being introduced on Thursday at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam. Through the application of document protection capabilities previously used in Adobe Acrobat documents, Flash Access can enable content owners to set permissions for access or limit copying of multimedia content. Flash Access is due to ship early next year.
[ For more Adobe news, see also "Adobe acquires Web platform builder." | Also expected at IBC: Microsoft will show off planned capabilities for its Silverlight 4 RIA technology. ]
"We can protect downloaded content so you can have the file on our hard drive instead of just streaming it. But that file can be restricted by the publisher so that the user can be limited in the number of copies they can make," said Mark Randall, chief strategist for the dynamic media organization at Adobe.
Flash Media Rights Management Server has been used for showing content such as sports, TV shows, and movies. "It's a cross-section of the video content you find on the Web, most of t being professional content," Randall said. But the technology also can be used to control sensitive content inside the enterprise, such as a human resources video or an advertising campaign, he said.
"You can now secure that video in an enterprise scenario," said Randall.
Adobe changed the name of the product because the previous name was too unwieldy and the upgrade is substantial, according to Randall.
Adobe at the conference also will show a screen-writing tool, Adobe Story, for writing searchable scripts for video and multimedia productions. A beta version will be available on Adobe Labs, with general release planned for next year.
"Now you can have the entire script as searchable content," in any search engine, Randall said. Metadata is captured from scripts.
