Adobe and the BBC today announced a strategic relationship around the delivery of Web video. By adopting Adobe Flash Player software, the BBC will make its free catch-up TV service — BBC iPlayer —available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Windows, by the end of the year. The strategic relationship will also allow the BBC to provide a single consistent user experience for the majority of streamed video and audio content on www.bbc.co.uk.

I’m very excited about this announcement as it validates the importance of delivering cross platform content to all of your users and creating an “it just works” experience. It’s also great to see the BBC talk about how Adobe’s client technologies are only part of the solution. The BBC, the world’s largest creator of original media content, also uses the full Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium suite for their video production.

Mashable.com says:

…What’s most interesting about this whole deal is the BBC’s slight departure from Microsoft dominance when it comes to the implementation of the iPlayer. This is great for consumers, but we’re all wondering if this will have any affect on the relationship between the BBC and Adobe’s rival, who was recently noted as wanting to work out a deal with the BBC for content distribution across the Xbox network.

last100.com says:

…Whilst it’s tempting to interpret the BBC’s decision to partner with Adobe as a political one, since it both solves the Mac and Linux issue and answers critics who accused the public broadcaster of being too close to Redmond (Huggers himself used to be the former director of Microsoft’s Windows digital media division), there are a number of other compelling reasons for choosing Flash.

The Flash browser-based player has established itself as the industry standard for streaming video, after its adoption by sites such as YouTube, propelled by a large existing user base — Adobe claims claims the Flash player is installed on 99.3% of Internet-connected desktops. In contrast, Silverlight isn’t yet a proven technology and, having only just launched, doesn’t have nearly the number of users that Adobe boasts.

Ryan Stewart (who works on my team at Adobe) says:

…Just like a lot of big media sites out there, most of their video is in WMV format. That’s something that Adobe has had trouble breaking in to. Despite the benefits and ubiquity of Flash, it’s expensive to convert a massive library of WMV content to Flash content. But because Flash is so popular and now will support the H.264 codec, people are starting to make that move despite the cost.

Read/Write Web says:

…The choice of Adobe’s Flash technology makes sense. According to Adobe, Flash is deployed on over 99% of Internet-connected computers and the latest version of the Flash player supports the H.264 codec. Further, the 1.0 release of AIR should also incorporate Flash’s HD video capabilities, so should the BBC wish to bring Flash video to the offline version of their iPlayer, Adobe’s runtime will support 1080p. I was told that the BBC will be evaluating the possibility of using Adobe’s Media Player in the future.

Check out the full press release here.

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