Flash and DRM

Andy Plesser, who has been on a tear lately, has an interview up with Chris Hock on Adobe's digital media team about Flash and DRM. DRM is something that I always struggle with and especially in Flash. Now that I see some of the internal discussions at Adobe I'm confident that our solution won't be rushed and will work without ruining the things that make Flash great (easy, ubiquitous).

In the interview, Chris talks about Adobe's DRM story. One is Flash Media Server, which has a "protected stream" model and lets content creators make sure the video isn't being saved on users local machines. All the communication I've seen indicates that we're moving deliberately on DRM because we don't want to ruin the great Flash experience. A lot of people have found the DRM/video story in Silverlight really compelling. Silverlight won't have DRM in the first version but it will be in Silverlight 1.1 which is currently scheduled for sometime in mid 2008.

The DRM picture in rich internet application technologies is still very much in progress. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out but for the most part I'm excited about how Adobe is planning to handle it. I think MAX will be a really great conference for anyone interested in rich media and DRM (and rich internet applications in general).