Adobe is releasing Project Primetime to beta on Thursday. It's the company's effort to streamline the process of bringing broadcast television to IP and connected devices.
The online TV industry is exploding. More than just original programming built for the web, we've seen a huge surge in availability of premium content across devices. This isn't just with rental and VOD services such as Amazon and Netflix; we're seeing more broadcasters adopt the TV Everywhere model.
In fact, the success of initiatives such as HBO Go and the Summer Olympics has shown that users are willing to look up their cable or satellite user information to login, in order to access live or premium content on the web or connected devices.
Adobe saw a tenfold increase in the number of premium video streams authenticated for TV Everywhere across smartphones and tablets the first six months of 2012 — largely driven by the Olympics. This is especially huge when you consider that the completion rate of ads on mobile are 94% — higher than any other environment.
Plus, broadcasters and operators have learned from the music industry's mistakes. They understand that holding content back from the Internet is a lose-lose proposition. With the fall 2012 TV season, we've seen more ways to watch content online or on devices than ever before.
Right now, the process of getting content from broadcast to the web or to connected devices — including phones, tablets, set-top boxes and game consoles — is a painful one. Broadcasters and operators have to jump through lots of hoops, not only to get the content in a format that works across devices, but to integrate those systems with various advertising and analytic solutions.
And End-to-End Solution for Broadcasters and Operators
This is the problem Adobe wants to solve with Project Primetime, which it bills the "first fully integrated video technology platform for publishing and monetizing TV across any Web-connected device."
With Project Primetime, Adobe wants to do for the video industry what it has done for the creative and publishing industries. Just as digital creatives have Creative Suite, Adobe is pushing Project Primetime for broadcasters and operators.
Project Primetime breaks the broadcast-to-IP workflow into three pieces:
- Publishing — The publishing piece using a single publishing, playback and DRM workflow that allows broadcasters to go to live, linear or Video On Demand (VOD) at scale.
- Advertising — The advertising component lets broadcasters have full control over monetizing content and adapting ads for different demographics, devices or users from one dashboard.
- Data — The data component lets teams access analytics in real-time, and make changes to the ads or other measures on the fly.
Part of the publishing piece includes Adobe Pass, which is the company's one-stop TV Everywhere authentication tool. Adobe Pass is being used by some of the biggest players in the industry to handle authenticating logins to access content. Adobe powered NBC Sport's Olympics app. This allowed NBC to easily work with hundreds of different cable operators and systems, and it let users log in once, without having to authenticate over and over again.
The publishing aspects of Project Primetime also include Adobe Access and Adobe Streamkit, which make it easy to push out one broadcast stream that can adapt to hundreds of device types.
Primetime Media Player
At the center of Project Primetime is the new Primetime Media Player. This is a player that Adobe has developed to solve some of the biggest challenges facing online TV:
- Device fragmentation
- Bad user experience/tons of buffering
- Failure to make money
It works by offering up a seamless video and ad playback experience. In most systems, the broadcast stream and ad streams are different. This is problematic on the web because there is a pause for buffering for ad plays, and then again when the content returns.
An SDK of Primetime Media Player is available today for Windows, OS X, Android and iOS. In the first quarter of 2013, support will be extended to the mobile web, game consoles, connected TVs and over-the-top devices.
What Adobe does is combine these elements into one seamless stream. The secret sauce, however, is that Adobe still lets operators and broadcasters insert ads in live, linear or VOD streams in a dynamic way.
MediaWeaver
This ad insertion service is called MediaWeaver, and it's a new product that Adobe announced Thursday. The cool thing about MediaWeaver is that it works both with video content on the web and in apps, as well as on connected devices.
More than just offering a way to insert ads, MediaWeaver also lets broadcasters create new types of ad experiences, including offering dynamic offers or call- to-action, depending on the device or subscriber profile.
For example, a cable operator could offer a user an extension of their HBO subscription in exchange for signing up or trying another bundled service. More importantly, MediaWeaver can talk to the analytics and data parts of Project Primetime to make decisions about what types of ads to insert based on preset or on-the-fly parameters.
Data and Advertising Integration
Adobe is a unique company in that it creates publishing tools, ad-serving tools and high-end analytics and data analysis tools. With Project Primetime, the company is putting all that data into one place.
Distributors can look at audience engagement in tools such as SiteCatalyst and AudienceManager to make decisions about what ads get served using MediaWeaver.
What Does This Mean For Consumers?
The real promise of Adobe Project Primetime is what it can bring consumers. Right now, online TV is better than ever before, but it's still not as easy or as accessible as broadcast signals.
With any luck, in five years, that won't be the case. Moreover, the tangible benefit of having full turnkey solutions such as Project Primetime is that it will be easier for the cable and broadcasting industries to start or improve their moves into digital.
Just as the magazine industry needed tools for publishing to tablets, the television industry needs tools for getting broadcast content online.
What do you think of Adobe's plans to make TV Everywhere mainstream? Let us know in the comments below.
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