Adobe have made some announcements at this week's Streaming Media East Conference in New York and streamingmedia.com has some great coverage on that.
The two main topics are the announcement that Flash Access 2.0, Adobe's new flavour of DRM for Flash video, is now available. Previously known as Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, Flash Access 2.0 will enable publishers to encrypt content at source and deliver it securely to the end user. This is different to simply using RTMPE for encrypted streaming as not only the transmission will be encrypted but the actual content will be as well. Previously, with Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, this technique was only supported in AIR, Adobe's desktop runtime. But with Flash Player 10.1 it will also be supported in the browser based Player, and there are a bunch of new AS3 APIs to make this happen.
Secondly is HTTP streaming. This is also a new 10.1 feature and will allow transmission of video content over HTTP, with the difference that it is no longer a simple progressive download but will also support full seeking, live broadcasts and multi-bitrate switching. A real alternative to RTMP based streaming basically. What's more, the HTTP streaming module for on-demand streaming over standard HTTP servers will likely be free, whilst the live module looks likely to be a paid product.
As mentioned, more details are to be had in Tim's article on Flash Access and the Player roadmap as well as Troy's piece on Flash Access and HTTP Streaming.
#1 by Asai on 5/12/10 - 5:44 PM
#2 by Bob Wohl on 5/12/10 - 5:52 PM
There is still a lot of use cases for FMS. You cannot protect http content. You still need FMS for live streaming(ingest) using http. Http content gets cached, RTMP* does not. These are just a few off the top of my head.
#3 by gary on 5/12/10 - 10:58 PM
with the new adobe HTTP Streaming you can protect your movies much harder as you RTMP can do it for you.
my 2 cents about this:
RTMP protocol specification is open, every 2 class dumper like wireshark can rip this.
RTMP(E) is simply hashing, has not toDo with encryptiong for me. If you want to stream secure you have to use RTMP(S). RTMP(S) has a very big overhead cause it requires a HTTP Tunnel.
With the new HTTP Streaming for flashplayer 10.1 you can use any encryption you like - and a big plus, you can change it when you want. RTMP cracking required in the past that adobe updates the hole flashplayer.
Livestreaming is very easy with the new HTTP Streaming. We have modified digital rapids hardware for this.
If you want to see a good example how http streaming is working with FP 10.1 visit this side:
http://onlinelib.de/demos/fhttp3/" target="_blank">http://onlinelib.de/demos/fhttp3/
Please dont see this as spam (lets start discussion about this technology here)
We request to adobe the raw byte access since 4 years and now they have heard us.
Most of the people dont understand that this HTTP technology has nothing toDo with the "old" psyedo streaming.
So...what you think? I love flashvideo :)
Best
gary
http://onlinelib.de
#4 by Philipp Hancke on 6/1/10 - 12:56 PM
http://www.adobe.com/products/httpdynamicstreaming...
The F4F specification is still missing on the devnet, but that will hopefully be fixed soon.