Make It Your Own

However, instead of limiting yourself to the content provided by Adobe, you can customize this AIR app with your own feeds. To add an RSS feed to AMP, click the "My Favorites" option then click "Add RSS Feed" at the bottom of the screen. A box will pop up where you can enter in the RSS feed you want to subscribe to.

Here's a tip - to find an RSS feed for one of your iTunes video podcasts, right-click on it in iTunes and choose "Show Description." The feed URL with be at the top of the window that appears. After you enter that into AMP, you can then use AMP to keep up with your favorite video podcasts.

Diggnation in AMP

There are a few other places to get good RSS feeds for videos, too. You can expand AMP's default selection of Comedy Central programming by adding feeds provided on Comedy Central's own web site, for example, and you can grab RSS feeds from YouTube as well.

Of course, the ability to import an OPML file into AMP would be nice, but at least the RSS option makes the service more useful than other desktop apps like Joost where you're locked into only viewing what they're offering.

The benefit to watching shows in an AIR app instead of online is, like with any desktop app, the episodes are available offline. If you haven't tried Adobe Media Player yet, you can download it from here (direct link to .air app install).

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

"It's a merger of TV Guide and DVR for Internet video content," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release.

Because Flash has native support for high res video, AMP can display videos in 1080p, 720p or 480i. Indeed, the video in the Adobe Media Player looked very nice, even when streaming. Adobe doesn't host any content, but merely facilitates the delivery from CDN to user. AMP pulls content from partners via RSS feeds -- and users can add any video RSS feed into the player.

Right now, AMP will only display content by default of partners who have a relationship with Adobe. Interested content creators can email Adobe to get their content into AMP. Anyone, however, can seed content externally via an RSS feed. Adobe pulls channel branding directly from RSS feeds as well, so even content providers who have no relationship with Adobe can create branded channels in AMP -- the downside is those channels will only be available to users who add them via an external RSS link, and not in the application's global catalog.

According to Adobe Media Player Product Manager Ashley Still, at some point in the next year or so, Adobe plans to go the user generated content route and make it easier for people to add content directly into AMP's catalog. For now, though, that requires a relationship with Adobe's biz dev team.

Only content providers who have a relationship with Adobe will also be able to utilize Adobe's adserving technology to sell ads on a rev share basis on their videos in the media player. AMP supports pre, post, and mid roll ads, as well as overlay ads and the ability to serve advertising to downloaded videos offline. Offline ads on older downloaded content can be dynamically updated anytime the user connects to the web.

Adobe is also announcing the launch of Adobe TV. Adobe TV is a web site and AMP channel dedicated to aggregating Adobe's array of video blogs and tutorials. These videos had previously been scattered all across the Adobe web universe, on numerous blogs and web sites. Adobe TV brings them under a single umbrella and makes it easier for Adobe fans and users to find those videos or subscribe to them in the new media player software.

Conclusion

Adobe sees the release of AMP as a piece of their "ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next-generation broadcast entertainment." We see it as a showcase for Flash video -- which is getting competition from Microsoft's Silverlight -- and AIR. There is no better way to show off your developers tools than to demonstrate something cool that was made with them.

It is also another piece in Adobe's growing online empire. In October, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that within the next ten years Adobe applications would all be completely in the cloud. That's an ambitious goal, but Adobe recognizes that web apps are the future. The full power of Illustrator or Premiere operating in the cloud might be more then 10 years away, but by using their web application stack (Flash, Flex, AIR, etc.) to push out less complex consumer apps, Adobe is betting that it can get the mainstream used to the idea of web applications and get developers hooked on Adobe tools in the process. That's a smart play.

Initially, AMP! will be rolled out on Yahoo!'s newspaper alliance which posts some 600 members including the New York Daily News, the fifth largest paper in the US.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of AMP! is the talk of an open API for networks. "For ad networks, we believe AMP! will accelerate a free market economy for advertising," wrote Yahoo! in a press release. "With core relationship management built into the platform, ad networks can expand their businesses by connecting to advertisers, publishers, agencies, and other ad networks all through an easy interface."

In February, Emre Sokullu proposed on this blog and alternative plan for Microsoft to go after Google that involved splitting up the advertising atom. In essence, Sokullu said that to take on Google, a company that has access to a large amount of ad inventory, has to offer that inventory up to third party networks to sell with their own targeting perameters. "In an open advertising model, the inventory silo, placement silo, and parameter silo are controlled by many different organizations, which can interact with each other and create advertising mashups," he wrote.

Is that what Yahoo! is essentially doing with AMP!, or are the APIs going to enable something more akin to the ad marketplace we see already with Yahoo!-owned Right Media? Yahoo! says that AMP! will allow "ad networks, through an open set of APIs, to innovate on top of the transparent marketplace." It will be interesting to see what exactly that means. A video introducing AMP! from Yahoo! is embedded below.