Adobe Primetime for Connected TV
April 11, 2013
At NAB Adobe announced the general availability of Primetime (formerly “Project Primetime”), it says it is the most advanced TV publishing and monetization platform for programmers and pay TV service providers.
The company also announced technology collaborations with dozens of industry leaders, including encoders, cloud platform providers, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to pave the way for TV content across every connected screen. Ecosystem partners include Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Elemental Technologies, Envivio, Harmonic, iStreamPlanet, RGB Networks, thePlatform and others. Comcast Cable and NBC Sports Group have signed on as first Adobe Primetime launch partners.
Adobe Primetime enables programmers and pay TV service providers to capitalize on the rising consumer interest in watching and engaging with digital video while helping protect and maximize the value of their content. The platform tightly integrates Adobe’s video publishing, player, DRM, advertising and analytics solutions to help eliminate the complexity of reaching audiences across screens and to create great digital video experiences while also offering new monetization opportunities for programmers and pay TV service providers. The seamless tie-in with ecosystem partners offers for the first time a highly scalable and reliable solution that can be implemented consistently across devices and platforms. Adobe Primetime’s interoperable components can be deployed individually to fit their infrastructure needs or let the full solution handle the entire workflow.
Comcast Cable has incorporated several of Adobe Primetime’s modular components across certain XFINITY Web properties to deliver and monetize IP-delivered video and give their subscribers access to their favorite content via these properties. Comcast is leveraging a broad range of Adobe Primetime capabilities, including the player, DRM, ad insertion, ad serving, and analytics – in various configurations. NBC Sports Group also launched with Adobe Primetime, and now uses the solution to offer live sporting events, including Major League Soccer (MLS) and National Hockey League (NHL) games, as well as Golf Channel content across devices. Consumers are able to watch the content live and on demand.
To help content owners and distributors more efficiently bring more content to more devices, Adobe Primetime provides a single publishing workflow with one video format (HLS) and one DRM solution – all built around the Adobe Primetime Player. By incorporating HLS into the Flash Player for desktops, TV content owners and distributors will be able to efficiently reach more of their audience by deploying one consistent player. In addition, support for broadcast-specific capabilities such as closed captioning, dynamic ad insertion, and analytics dramatically help reduce costs while enabling advertising revenue with a single workflow and fewer video assets to encode, manage, deliver and store. Adobe Primetime will also continue to support HDS streaming.
“Adobe Primetime will help the industry address the new and evolving video consumption needs of consumers,” said David Karnstedt, senior vice president, Media and Ad Solutions, Adobe. “Bringing TV to every connected screen requires broad technology collaboration across the ecosystem, which is core to Adobe’s DNA. With our integrated approach and as a trusted technology provider to the industry, Adobe is uniquely positioned to support and drive this increasing demand in digital television.”
“Adobe offers the right technologies to help us streamline TV services and bring them anywhere our customers want to watch their favorite content,” said Sree Kotay, senior vice president and chief software architect, Comcast Cable. “As the industry continues to expand where consumers watch content and the different ways they can watch it – Adobe Primetime has created a programmable video solution that supports our multiplatform roadmap.”
“NBC Sports Group is using Adobe Primetime to bring major sporting events online,” said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group. “Our viewers expect to watch television programming on any connected device, and Adobe’s broad collaboration through the industry ensures that we can deliver a TV-like experience across devices while integrating their Adobe Primetime platform into our existing infrastructure.”