Building advertising experiences for Adobe Media Player

Adobe Media Player provides an unprecedented, connected rich media experience to consumers in an easy-to-use, intuitive desktop interface. Publishing your content to Adobe Media Player allows you to deliver high-quality video to your audience with built-in mechanisms for security, measurability, and monetization (see Figure 1). This article discusses Adobe Media Player monetization by covering general concepts around creating and delivering rich advertising experiences using Adobe Media Orchestration Documents (AMODs).

Figure 1. An AMOD playing in Adobe Media Player

Adobe Media Player leverages two open-standard, XML-based technologies to organize video content and orchestrate rich media experiences: Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Synchronized Media Integration Language (SMIL).

RSS is a popular method for hierarchically organizing content and is employed throughout Adobe Media Player. It is used extensively in the Adobe Media Player Catalog where Episodes (video content) are grouped into a hierarchy of Network, Channel, and then Show. Video publishers arrange their content into RSS feeds and submit them to Adobe for inclusion in the Adobe Media Player Catalog. When an Episode is clicked, the RSS feed instructs Adobe Media Player what to play (see Figure 2): either a stand-alone video file or a SMIL file (AMOD). Please refer to the Adobe Media Player Content Developer Kit (CDK) for more information.

Figure 2. Linking content to Episodes in RSS

SMIL is a language for creating rich media experiences using a playlist paradigm. Blocks of rich media content—video, images, and Adobe Flash SWFs—can be sequenced across time and grouped into layout regions. Sequences can be nested, providing a virtually limitless number of possibilities. Adobe Media Player leverages a subset of the SMIL 2.1 specification and adds some Adobe Media Player–specific functionality. This subset is referred to as Adobe Media Orchestration Documents or AMODs.

Throughout this article, I will work through code listings for creating RSS feeds and AMODs, demonstrating some basic advertising including in-stream and video overlays. While the links in the RSS and AMOD work out of the box, I encourage you to create the files on your own and upload them to a web server. If you do so, please remember to update the links in the RSS and AMOD to reflect the location of your web server. The RSS feed for all of the samples in this article can be referenced at http://demo20.panachetech.com/amparticle/samples.xml.

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