Friday, May 16, 2008    Text size: 

Code-named "Astro," Adobe's Flash Player 10 boasts an array of enhancements, including new support for custom filters and special effects; native 3D transformation; and customizable rich text layout.

Online guru Brandon Shalton runs the traffic analysis service T3Report.com and is an all-around expert on the interaction between mainstream technology and the adult industry. He called the development "exciting" and pointed out the powerful potential of the native 3D transformation functionality built into the new Flash Player.

"This means that 3D worlds like SecondLife or RedLightCenter might be able to use Flash rather than an installed program download," he told XBIZ.

But it's the new player's peer-to-peer features that has some industry members shaking with excitement — or just in their boots.

Tech blogger Om Malik noted that in January, Adobe acquired the company Amicima, a small startup that specialized in a number of technologies, including peer-to-peer, which would help Adobe insert itself into the content-delivery network marketplace.

Content-delivery networks are networks of computers or servers that interact to deliver content, usually multimedia, to users across the Web.

"I have been following this closely," Malik wrote of Adobe's acquisition of Amicima. "And my sources say that this is a solid technology with the potential to seriously disrupt the CDN market."

Desire Athow at ITProPortal.com agreed.

"A Flash P2P service would be a killer feature for content distributors since it would allow media to be distributed quickly, easily and at a cheaper cost," she wrote.

Shalton noted that speculation about the new Flash Player's P2P possibilities is just that, speculation, though he noted that the new Flash Player may let users stream videos from other computers or servers instead of always going back to the main Flash server.

For more information, visit Adobe.com or head directly to the download page to try out the new Flash Player.