While Flash is very popular and Flash Video content is exploding through the roof, one criticism of the Flash Media Server platform was its price. To put it bluntly, it was pricey to the tune of $45,000 per server with connection limitations. Now, Adobe is addressing that with its new release of Flash Media Server 3, the first update to the platform put together by the Adobe team (previous releases were under the Macromedia brandname.) The new release, announced today and shipping in January, will be priced at a top level of $4,500 without any limits on bandwidth or connections.
Now, you can serve as many users as your server hardware can handle. Very good news for content providers that want to put a Flash server in their infrastructure. For those that do upgrade to Flash Server 3, they’ll get a number of performance enhancements include the ability to serve H.264-based HD content, better DRM capabilities and the ability to stream files over 2GB in size (important for serving full-length movies in HD). For content providers that use a CDN for their streaming needs (Network World included) will eventually benefit from the ability to offer H.264-based content. Adobe announced today that Flash Player 9 Update 3 now supports H.264, meaning content providers like us can encode once for both Web and iTunes/iPod delivery. Currently, we must encode to two formats (Flash and QuickTime/MPEG-4) meaning more storage is required. Once Flash Server 3 is implemented fully in the various CDNs (Limelight is already out with support) and Flash Player 9 is on a majority of machines, we’ll be able to cut out an encoding process and slim down our future storage needs, saving both time and money. Looking forward to that day.
