Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players

Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."

Comments

gnash to rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly I feel strong urge to support Free Software
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Flash has *always* had enforced ad viewing

[chrisspurgeon]

Adding DRM to off-line viewing of videos is new, but for the typical scenario of online viewing of Flash videos via a Flash player embedded in a HTML page, the ability to force ad viewing is nothing new. It's always been easy to roll a Flash video play that doesn't allow skipping or scrubbing through the video ad, but then enables that feature once the main video begins. Many sites that feature Flash video do exactly that.

Wow. Slashdotters miss the point (again)

[matchboy]

Adobe isn't going to force everyone to watch ads. They are doing exactly what a lot of their customers are asking for. People who are creating their own video casts (merlin mann for example) may want to monetize their videocasts by adding sponsorship to their videos. This allows people to redistribute their content much easier and still guarantee that their sponsors are being seen. Currently, the average video blogger/caster doesn't have a lot of resources for managing this themselves. (adding video to the beginning of the video file) Think about it. A video blogger will be able to change their sponsors without reprocessing their videos. Seems reasonable to me.