Last June I wrote about my objections to Creative Commons recommending Adobes’s Extensible Markup Platform (XMP) as the preferred format for embedded metadata.

This article from Bill Rosenblatt’s excellent DRM Watch called my attention to Adobe’s next step of introducing their new DRM system: the Flash Media Rights Management Server.

One of their marketing people wrote:

Adobe is driving a fusion of TV and the Internet with Adobe Media Player, Flash Media Server, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization.

Wow… this sounds promising and the architecture of their system looks interesting (see this diagram from their datasheet).

Of course I am curious. I want to play with it. Lets have a look… first I need to download their Adobe Flash Media Development Server 3. There is a version for Linux available, so at least there is a chance that I can run it on my computer. Then I need to grab the Adobe Media Player which requires Adobe AIR.

Finally, I need the Rights Management Server, but unfortunately this component isn’t available for download – I have to fill a form to be contacted by a Flash Media Rights Management Server specialist.

Hmm… maybe I will contact them another time.

Anyway, this article by one of Adobe’s product managers provides some interesting insights about Adobe’s strategy.

To be sure, content owners and developers can continue to deliver high-quality video without any protections or limitations to access of any kind (such as with Creative Commons licensing) through Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Media Player, and Adobe AIR. You can deliver video either embedded into your SWF, as a separate video file progressively downloaded from a web server, or through Flash Media Server. Considering that Flash Player has achieved over 98 % penetration on the desktop, this is the easiest way to get your free videos to the largest audience.

Moreover, content owners enjoy additional options with Flash Media Server to help protect where and when their videos are viewed, such as domain access control, authorization adapters, SWF verification, and RTMPE. Flash Media Rights Management Server introduces a new set of options for developers and content owners to protect their content.

In other words Adobe’s strategy is:

• User generated content e.g. published on Youtube resulted in a nearly 100 percent penetration of Adobe’s Flash Player
• Creative Commons actively promotes Adobe’s XMP standard
• One day content creators may wish to be paid for their work. Adobe’s document Using digital rights management suggests that this can be easily done through identity-based licensing, using the same Media Player that was previously given away for free
• However, the Adobe Rights Management Server, which is a key component of this platform will not be given away. Whoever wants to set up commercial video distribution services will have to pay license fees for Adobe’s server software

I don’t claim that Adobe’s strategy is immoral. Actually, it’ quite common. What I don’t understand is that the Creative Commons developers support a development that will lead to a situation where content creators will have to pay license fees to an intermediary software manufacturer if they want to be paid for their work. Open Source developers should rather support the development of the Chillout platform, which will be the foundation of a free platform to conduct content related business on the internet.

I just discovered that two technologies we implemented in the context of our Berlin based company Convergence Integrated Media are offered by a manufacturer of chipsets for Set-Top boxes. Our LinuxDVB API and DirectFB are part of the development environment customers can order together with the evaluation board. Alternatively to Linux Set-top box manufacturers can order a Windows CE developer kit.

Note that the architectures of the two alternative developement environments are very similar (see the figure quoting the STB development kit)

The fact that ten years after founding Convergence our concepts are deployed by major manufacturers of CE devices proves that our plan to regain control over television and other user interface based appliances was successful.

Since the implementation of open standards (e.g. DVB) was licensed as Open Source software (GPL) many independent software developers could learn and understand the technologies of digital television devices and services. Thus the old media cartels (studios, broadcasters, cable network providers) are losing their monopolies to create, produce, distribute and receive television content and services.

I predict that sooner or later an open payment platfrom for television related content and services will establish itself. It remains to be seen how long the cartels manage to survive by operating proprietary payment platforms on top of the open standards based receivers.

Claude Le Berre’s investigations on the nature of memory and especially on the question how moving images are affecting our minds have yielded an impressive result: Core Memory is a collection of scenes that were extracted from movies and reconstructed using the average colours of the still images.

Much in contrast to my wife’s my memory of movies is not good at all. I can hardly remember the faces of the actors, nor the dialogues or the scenes. However, sometimes I can remember a mood that was transported by a movie while I was watching it

I don’t know how my memory stores knowledge and experiences, but I am sure that it is not stored in the form of pictures. Two years ago I read Ferdinand Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916). I think that Saussure knows a lot about memory. He claimed that our minds store words acoustically – which reminds me of Claude’s Core Memory samples.

On the other hand I am pretty sure that the stories transported by moving images affected my memory. And the moving images consist of still images consisting of coloured shapes and patterns. Extracting the colours to analyze the memory is not bad, although for the scenes I remember I would have expected more brilliant colours. One idea could be to play with the colour extraction algorithm – just google for “dominant coulour extraction”.