Flash Media Server 3

Adobe announced Flash Media Server 3 this week, now as a two-product line that includes the basic streaming server plus a new Interactive Media Server; this is really exciting news – Flash Player 9 with H.264 is now available and finally we can move away from Nellymoser ASAO and all the limitations it imposed. There are a number of other new features too – 128bit DRM via a new RTMPE protocol and HE-AAC audio are the headline features, but the new support for Flash Lite 3 is also welcome. It’s also just become much cheaper to adopt, with prices from $995 for the core server up to $4500 (the previous starting point) for the Interactive version.

So what does this mean for Wowza and Red5? At the moment things are actually looking very promising; the Wowza team seems confident that H.264 will be supported soon after FMS3 is released (January) and as before FMS3 is limited to Windows Server and RedHat only, with Actionscript on the server-side. The only thing missing now would be support for AMF3, which is quite important as AS3 is used increasingly for streaming application development. AMF0 still works of course, but native support would be much better overall.

Podcast recorders and HD video in web pages are now completely achievable, which makes me happy :-)

Steven Carpenter : 06 Dec 2007 20:24 |  Tags: Flash Flex Rich Media Streaming Video |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem