Adobe's new version for Flash Player (10.1) could be a real game changer when it comes to online video streaming. With the public war with Apple at its peak, Adobe reveals some of its plans to fight back against the iPad blockage.
Adobe will implement new P2P features in its Flash Player that will allow the user to download streamed content from other peers, not only from the streaming server, said Kevin Towes, product manager for Adobe's Flash Media Server disclosing his company's strategy during an interview with
Beet.tv.
As an example, let's pretend that someone wants to watch a video on YouTube using Adobe's new soon-to-be released player. If that video is also being viewed by someone else at the same time with us, we would have the option to allow our Flash Player to download small video parts not only from YouTube's servers, but some of the other people watching the video as well.
This will be done using an experimental project hosted in the Adobe Labs called Stratus, which enables P2P capabilities in Flash applications. While this new tool will seriously reduce bandwidth costs for streaming services, it will increase the user's bandwidth and CPU usage, just like a regular BitTorrent client would do when started.
Adobe plans to avoid controversy by implementing a choice screen similar to the one for the webcam and microphone permissions. This screen will prompt and ask the user if he would like to see the video using Stratus' P2P features, or the classical way, by downloading it from the streaming server.
Mr. Towes warned that this may be a loophole for streaming companies to force users into opting for the P2P option by refusing to play the video or playing it at a lower resolution and/or bit-rate. This may not be the case for big companies like YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu or TV broadcasters, but smaller providers would generally try to force users into using the P2P version, due to the high costs of Internet bandwidth.
The interview with Kevin Towes can be viewed below.
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