Adobe Announces Flash Media Encoding Server

Adobe today announced the release of the newest product in their end-to-end platform for creating and deploying rich media content on the web to multiple screens (desktop and mobile), the Flash Media Encoding Server. Priced at $6,000, Adobe’s new product is an enterprise level encoding and transcoding server for converting video from a variety of formats to Flash. The software supports conversion from video in Windows Media format, DivX, H.264, MPEG-4, Quicktime and others to FLV or F4V video.

Adobe’s Vice President and General Manager of Dynamic Media Jim Guerard told me that they’re not trying to replace or compete with other encoding products — some of which, such as NCode from Silversoft, are free and open source — but rather the new product is aimed at enterprise customers who would rather purchase all pieces of their Flash workflow from one vendor.

Geurard told me that Adobe’s corporate enterprise and education customers had been asking for a turnkey encoding solution, and this is a response to those requests. Indeed, an encoding server product was a glaring omission from their current enterprise Flash lineup. The Flash Media Encoding Server plugs a hole in their end-to-end Flash product ecosystem.

Given the cost, and the free and lower-cost alternatives, however, it’s unlikely that small-time Flash publishers will opt for the new Flash Media Encoding Server. And Adobe seems fine with that.

In addition to encoding and transcoding video to Flash, the Media Encoding Server can also apply pre-processing filters to video such as color space conversions, normalizing audio, and sharpening video.

Information about the Flash Media Encoding Server is available at http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaencoding/.