Adobe Media Player

» see adobe.com/products/mediaplayer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Adobe Media Player was region-locked at the licensing layer, which is a dry way of saying that the entire product was American television. CBS, PBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music and Scripps signed on to supply the catalog, and the catalog was the product. Install it in Turkey in 2008 and you got a well-made window with almost nothing behind it. I never had a reason to keep it.

It was shown publicly on 16 April 2007 and version 1.0 landed a year later, in April 2008. Adobe built it as one of the first applications on AIR, the runtime it had launched to let Flash developers ship desktop software, so the player was partly a real product and partly a demonstration that AIR could carry one.

What it did was download and manage video. You subscribed to shows and the episodes arrived in the background, to be watched in a dedicated application rather than in a browser. Publishers got to define the branding around the video and the advertising inside it, and Adobe got measurement data flowing back through a player it controlled end to end.

Adobe pulled it from Adobe TV on 16 September 2010. The download page hung around for a couple of months after that before the files came off adobe.com in December. There was no farewell post worth quoting, which is roughly the send-off it had earned.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

The product was aimed at publishers, not at viewers, and it is much easier to understand once you accept that. In 2008 a television network putting a show on the web faced a real problem: it either hosted the video itself and got no audience, or it put the video on YouTube and handed over the branding and the advertising inventory that went with it. Adobe's offer was a third route where the network kept both and Adobe supplied the pipe.

Every network executive who heard that pitch understood it immediately. The trouble is that no viewer was ever in the room. Nothing in the design answered the only question a person actually asks, which is why install a program to watch something already playing in a tab you have open.

~ the funny part ~

Adobe was arguing that video should leave the browser at the exact moment it owned video in the browser. Flash Player was on essentially every desktop in the world and YouTube ran on it, which meant Adobe already had the position everyone else was trying to build. Adobe Media Player was the company undercutting its own strongest asset in order to sell a weaker one, and the weaker one was weaker precisely because Flash had made the browser good enough.

The AIR side of it aged no better. AIR was Adobe's answer to the desktop, launched in 2008, sold to Harman in 2019 and now a niche runtime kept alive for legacy business software. The one thing Adobe Media Player convincingly demonstrated is that you could build a desktop application out of Flash. Nobody had asked to.

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