Brightcove to support Adobe Flash H.264 upgrade

Press Release issued by BrightCove

We're delighted to announce Brightcove support for the latest version
of Flash video. Moviestar, announced today, is the fruit of Adobe
efforts to bring the HD-capable H.264 video standard to Flash.
Moviestar matches Flash's ubiquity and rich user experience capability
with high video fidelity. This is a combination we've all been waiting
for since Flash 6, with blocky, instant-on video, first hit.

You can preview the new player at Adobe Labs.

Paramount's decision to throw its weight behind HD DVD this holiday
season, rather than Blu Ray, is getting the top tech headlines today.
But we'll look back years from now and see that Moviestar was a much
more significant milestone.

This is a watershed announcement for the online video industry, and
really media and TV as a whole. Quality just improved. TV-like
experiences will be possible on the web. Perhaps just as important,
consumers, independent producers, and media companies of all sizes
will be able to shoot (in some cases), edit, archive and distribute in
one format. This will radically alter production workflows and
associated investments for everyone.

Brightcove remains committed to Microsoft's Silverlight initiative –
which similarly combines rich user experience with high fidelity
video, and eventually DRM. Innovation from Microsoft and now Adobe is
clearly benefiting everyone in the ecosystem. This is good news.

We expect to roll out Moviestar support later this year in our backend
tools. It promises to be a pretty smooth upgrade path for both viewers
and thousands of professional video publishers who use Brightcove each
day. Brightcove user experiences are already enabled for H.264 support
(thanks for backward compatibility, Adobe). And our private-labeled
consumer media features, which now support 3GP, should get a boost as
well. Brightcove partners won't have to do anything to their existing
players to gain this capability. We recommend archiving digital
masters in H.264 files to get ready for an upgrade later this year.

An in depth technical overview of the big news is available here.