Weekly post 6: Adobe User Group Meeting

Wednesday October 10th I visited an Adobe User Group meeting in Amsterdam. Every once in a while these meetings are held for anyone who works with Adobe. Several professionals give readings, examples and demos about the subject of the meeting. This meeting was about (online) interactive video applications. The guest speakers were: Beamlab, Mark de Jong (Netmasters), Elvin Dechesne en Sander Riel (Satama Flash Fabriek), Waldo Smeets (Adobe) and Jorge Calleja (Wieden & Kennedy). Not too bad I think, because Satama Flash Fabriek were the ones who created “Het huis van morgen” (2005) and Jorge Calleja was creative director in the development of the very successful “Get the glass” campaign (6 million visitors to the website, a few million gallons of milk sold more the year after). You can see his portfolio here.

The whole meeting was about online interactive video and how flash video will play an increasing role in this development. Every aspect of interactive video was brought up; Adobe told us about new technologies and safety protocols, Netmasters talked about encoding methods, software and hardware and Satama told us what you need to create a successful video shoot to implement in an interactive flash application. According to this meeting interactive video is the future online. Take a look at mogulus.com (created/supported by Netmasters). With Mogulus, the internet, and a webcam, “along with your talent and passion to communicate” you can create your own online TV station. It’s like blogging but then with video. Of course there is a whole network implemented as well so you can see other stations too. User generated content at -yet- another level.

A new Adobe product was also presented by the Adobe speaker, Waldo Smeets. He presented the Adobe Media Player (see how it works). It’s a stand alone flash video player. The goal is to create a personalized TV experience on the computer. It works a little bit like RSS; with the help of a feed you can download (stream, you can’t put them on your local disk) all kinds of shows and movies you like. You can also download ahead, so that when you’re offline you can still watch them. You can completely personalize the looks of the player. The player also allows bannering in the downloaded shows (flash overlays), and even when the consumer watches the shows being offline, the statistics are saved (no. of clicks etc.). There was a question what the difference was between the Adobe Media Player and Joost. The biggest difference is that Joost works with the P2P system and the AMP works like an RSS feed.

Altogether it was a very interesting meeting, a lot of different points of view on online interactive video and much inspiration for new ways to apply this technology!