Adobe Media Player (beta)

A media player is about entertainment—and it's not entertainment if it's not fun. Adobe's new media player is just not fun enough to offer any real reason to use it—yet. The company's Flash technology—both the player and the servers—powers most of the video that's watched on the Web. Now the company wants in on the content side, too, with this conduit between the media companies and your desktop. Adobe Media Player (AMP) takes the company into territory occupied by iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and others, offering standalone Adobe-branded video player software for the first time.
Getting going with AMP requires downloading and installing three pieces of software: AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), Flash Player 9 (chances are good you already have this one, however), and the AMP software itself. The standard, simple AIR app installation ensues. For those not familiar with AIR, it's Adobe's platform software for turning Web applications into desktop applications that keep their ability to access the Internet. AIR programs have full access to your system as well as to the Internet, so be sure you trust the source for any AIR app you install. At any rate, Flash Player 9 is also a good update to have on your system, as it supports the H.264 encoding used by HD video.
When you first run AMP, you're presented with a simple black window with just four sections: My Favorites (empty to start with), Catalog (which highlights partner content, like new videos from Geffen), Personal Videos, and Options. The top of the window offers Home and Back buttons. Clicking on an entry in Catalog brings up a list of videos you can play along the left, with the player window in the center. H.264 and HE-AAC support mean that the player is capable of excellent image quality, but most of the content I found was not high-def. The player can zoom your show out to full screen, so it's ready for higher-def content.
The AMP interface, however, is somehow just not as inviting as most other ways to get video on your PC. It's hard to know how to get into it, where to start. "Catalog" somehow doesn't grab me, but that's where you'll generally start getting content. The fonts in the interface are very small, with no way to resize them. There isn't the kind of hierarchical organization you see in iTunes or Windows Media Player that lets you easily find media types and genres. What's the difference between Home and Dashboard? How come so often there's a link or button for where you already are?
When I clicked on Catalog, then Featured, there were still three links for Catalog on the page, but none of them took me back to the first Catalog page that showed all content, not just Featured. I had to hit Back, and then choose Catalog again to get there. The only way to browse content is via video thumbnails—a text list browser like that in iTunes or Windows Media Player might sometimes be a faster way to get to the media you want. I could add my own Flash videos to AMP's Personal Videos section, but not Windows Media or Apple .MV4 videos.
The Catalog section includes content from AnswerTV, Better.tv, blip.tv, concierge.com, Motionbox, PBS, and Universal Music Group, but missing are some big Web video content sources—in particular, the one that dwarfs the rest: YouTube, which uses the same FLV Flash Video file format. Also missing are network shows, which would make sense for AMP to have. NBC Shopping is in the Catalog section, but not NBC programs. Favorites—really RSS subscriptions to shows—are another touted feature of the service and take their place at the top of the program's window. It would be nice to see which videos were most popular and most favorited, but alas, that's not in this version of AMP.
When I tried to add the Mindflo channel to my Favorites (I had just watched an episode from the channel), the left panel read "This show does not contain any episodes," but it actually was added, with all 20 episodes showing. I got "buffering" delays periodically while watching a KQED video about smart mobs. And sometimes the application was very slow to load thumbnails of content during navigation. Animated thumbnails slide across the screen to the left when you pick a video to watch, so there are some slick interface tricks up AMP's sleeves. Another video from concierge.com just stopped advancing halfway through, though the background music continued.
AMP content is restricted to videos for now, not standalone music. Music videos are a big chunk of the content it targets. Despite this, sound quality was awful for the top highlighted video, Emmy Rossum's charming Slow Me Down, even for streaming audio—and I'm not usually very demanding that bit rates be over 64–kilobits per second—audiophiles take note. Further taking away from playback pleasure was that doing anything else with the Internet while watching the video made the video stutter.
A lot of the tech behind AMP is aimed at giving large media publishers a way to "monetize" their content, with strong DRM, backgrounds, banners, in-rolls, overlays, and logos they can add around the content display. Ad display capabilities are particularly emphasized, with technology that prevents the video from being viewed without the accompanying advertisements. And AMP allows content owners to collect anonymous usage data.
On a more personal level, social features are absent at this point. I'd love to be able to vote thumbs-up or -down on videos, or rate them as you can in RealPlayer or YouTube: I'd show those media companies what's good! This way, too, I'd see what other people liked, and maybe subscribe to users whose choices were similar to mine. It's surprising that even at this early stage in the product's life, there is no "most watched" video section. And if music videos are the mainstay of the service, how about some music genre choices? The genre choices in the program are all TV show related.
The AMP interface needs some serious work before anyone's going to ditch iTunes or Windows Media Player in favor of it. It just doesn't feel fully baked, and the content selection is not enticing. Fair enough: This is a beta, after all. Still, there's a lot of work to be done here. With no ability to sync to portable viewing devices or to larger TV screens, and no content or interface advantages over simply going to the video Web sites, I find no compelling reason to make AMP part of my daily entertainment or information consumption—yet. All this could easily change as the product and its content evolve. And it's likely that Adobe will attract more content providers with all the DRM and advertising features incorporated into the software.