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Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the advertising-ploy-to-rule-the-world dept.

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."

2 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. gnash to rescue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Flash has *always* had enforced ad viewing by chrisspurgeon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.