1. It appears the AP's overriding issue in their switch was pure old greed. Microsoft set them up with a team of salespeople to sell ads for their player and instead of the AP, a news organization with the charge of trying to reach as many people as possible, taking the time to check their facts about WMV incompatibility issues they just took Microsoft at their word and believe them when the word comes down from Redmond that they are "working on it."

Well, unless Microsoft plans on re-entering the Mac platform with another IE variant I doubt mac users will get any help there, and considering that the video is available as an IE-only app from over 450 of their member sites it tells me that the AP could care less about getting the news out and more about their own pocketbooks. I'm surprised that the one cable news outlet that is using Flash video to its full potential is Fox News, and perhaps the AP should look at the current ratings of MSNBC before they go and use them as a shining example of how Microsoft can make everyone's lives better using their DRM-d app.

Posted at 2:00AM on Mar 5th 2006 by Sean

2. Flash Streaming does have its advantages; one being that you cans custom the look and feel as well as cross platform. However DRM and Firewalls come time mind.

Firstly Broadcasters and content providers want their content secure. So far the only way to do this is to use Windows DRM. Macromedia does claim that the videos do not cache in your browser temp folder but rather than in the system itself. So it does prevent movies from being ripped from your web browser. and the flv format is very hard to transcode.

QuickTime does support DRM, but this only works with Videos on demand and not live streaming, and you have to give all your content to apple to encode and use their online portal.

But for live streams Flash are very poor, because of it’s inefficiently to tunnel the stream across port 80. So people behind firewalls would be able to see the live stream at all. Which is a major setback if you consider that multicasting will properly be the preferred choice of distribution as it’s cheaper.

Again flash videos very processor intensive and when you have a large video within a flash page and can look very sluggish

So till Adobe solve these issues then will not see a shift.

Posted at 10:01AM on Mar 10th 2006 by MO

3. firstly windows drm is not the only way to go, cspan for one uses real player drm in addition to wmp for live streaming (but i'm a flash blogger, not a real one) second i believe the problem here is one of the distributer not going out to look at multiple formats but only looking at the one... thus limited their audience which seems to to a huge mistake for an industry that needs to build rather than shrink their audience, plus if you must use windows drm why not follow the cnn pipline model instead and build a wmp 9 web based version of the product for your other users to include them... the issue here is with the ap's bad choice and not with adobe who might have reccommended a media server based method of streaming that could include chat streaming...

lastly: Again flash videos very processor intensive and when you have a large video within a flash page and can look very sluggish...

how is using wmv going to solve this? the answer is not at all, you are going to be forced away from this kind of dynamic content to house a wmv file that doesn stream to flash-based sites...

Posted at 11:59AM on Mar 10th 2006 by Mike Schleifstein

4. Real DRM yes does exist, but do you know what the cost of real DRm is. Their pricing model is similar to Microsoft, the more users the high the cost, the more servers the higher the cost, the more live streams the high the cost and that’s not even including your bandwidth expenditure.

Posted at 10:52AM on Mar 16th 2006 by MO

5. The Microsoft DRM if free of charge, same for Microsoft video server

Posted at 5:20PM on Mar 16th 2006 by Giuseppe