Adobe Releases a HTML5 Video Player (with Flash fallback)

It's the Kaltura player:<p><a href="http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/" rel="nofollow">http://www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5/</a><p>I'm not sure what part Adobe played - all of the code is Kaltura's, and the widget itself refers to their site. I think the "released" action is that they added it to their Widget Browser. Woot.<p>It's not clear, but the the Widget Browser is a separate AIR app - it's not built-in or part of Dreamweaver. Also, the video the author suggests to watch actually takes you to a teaser; you have to have an account to view it.

I think that Adobe is finally realizing that their value is in their tools, not in their platforms. Photoshop makes <i>lots</i> of money and doesn't have a platform aspect. The win-win strategy for both Adobe and the Web at large is to provide a killer Creative Suite that works seamlessly across devices.

So this widget requires Dreamweaver or some Adobe Air thingy. Unless you're a non-HTML person that's already using Dreamweaver (maybe at a college or something), this seems a lot less attractive than video-js or any of the other available HTML5 libraries.

My main concern with Adobe is that it seemed to me that they where more concerned (though rightfully so... they are a for profit company after all) with milking every last dollar out of Flash evangelizing it's used <i>everywhere.</i> They seem to have listened to the pleas of web designers everywhere now to embrace the new open standards, and that's great in my book. Now we need to get rid of Adobe Air, and leave Flash as a tool for animation as it was purputed in the past.

I'm not sure of Adobe's intentions but it's(from our perspective) in their best interest to focus on not fighting web trends and create the tools to facilitate them instead. Flash has evolved, but it's far from being open enough for the internet to enable it further. The future? It seems to me the beast will return from whence it came, specific and isolated, "flash!"

If I was Adobe I'll say the opposite. That it falls back <i>to</i> HTML5.<p>Sounds like they are accepting that Flash is on its way out.

Wait, you have to run an Air app in order to download an HTML5 widget?

As it should be done - amen!

So, elephant in the room, did Apple cause this?