Utterly Rediculous: Adobe's New Flash DRM Only Supported on AIR or AMP?!
I just sat through an hour-long session on the new Digital Rights Management (DRM) features available in Flash Media Server 3, the "Moviestar" update to the Flash player and related technologies. Throughout the session, AIR and the Adobe Media Player (AMP) were mentioned over and over as the delivery applications for DRM protected content using the Flash Media Rights Server. I asked if the same set of protections would be available in Flex or ActionScript 3-based Flash applications. The answer: no.
A lot of us who deliver content in Flash and, specifically, Flash video, have been waiting for a DRM solution for Flash video. I'm no fan of DRM, but a lot of the people who create content for the applications I build really want to protect (and monetize) their intellectual property, and I respect that. The DRM solutions we've been waiting for years for from Adobe (and Macromedia before them) were supposed to solve this problem.
Except now, we have to use AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) or the Adobe Media Player (which is an AIR app) to utilize the only DRM solution available for Flash video.
>.<
My users shouldn't have to download another application (AIR or AMP) to play back video content that I and my clients need to protect. I don't want to use AMP for my streams. I want to create an integrated environment in which my content is played, and not force my users to go outside that environment to view video. Adobe says that they are all about creating "engaging experiences," and making users hop from one application to another isn't exactly engaging. I know that I can make my own AIR app and make things as seamless as I want them to be, but user will still have to download AIR and that, in many situations, can be a big hurdle, if not downright impossible (hello, locked down desktops!).
I can understand needing the Flex framework to do this, but the what is so OS-integrated-specific about their DRM code that it has to be done in AIR? The rest of the AIR-specific classes make sense: drag+drop, local database storage, file system access. Sure, they have a secure local storage for DRM licenses in this new setup, but that's hardly necessary and something that could simply be turned off if the calling application was a Flex application rather than an AIR application. It seems to me that Adobe said "Hey, let's make them use AIR to drive AIR or AMP adoption." rather than creating something that's truly flexible.
Oh, and if DRM is super easy in Silverlight (which it more or less is), that's only going to solidify Microsoft's market for DRM-encoded content on the Web.
