Slated for release with Adobe's upcoming Flash 10.1 Player software, Stratus 2 could further cement Flash' market dominance — even as Google's VP8 and other OpenSource HTML5 video technologies are poised to dethrone Adobe's popular, but proprietary, online video solution.
According to Adobe, "RTMFP is the evolution of media delivery and real time communication over the Internet enabling peers on the network to assist in delivery."
First released in 2008 as a rendezvous service that allowed clients to pass data from one to another without using a server, Stratus has evolved to bring true P2P capabilities to the Flash platform — which is reportedly installed on more than 90 percent of PCs connected to the Internet. Stratus 2 supports the RTMFP "Groups" technology, integrated into the Flash Player 10.1 beta and Adobe AIR 2 beta. Groups are definable by their intended use, with the client application controlling access and allowing individual user addressing via support for directed routing.
Posting and object replication are enabled in Stratus 2, allowing instant messaging and remote sensor applications, for example — or any application where low bitrate data exchanges are required — and this may open an entire new world of targeted online adult advertising, content delivery and two-way communications. Application-level multicast capabilities distribute content across multiple peers, reducing the level of resources that are required by digital publishers.
"The most important features of RTMFP include low latency, end-to-end peering capability, security and scalability," states the Adobe Labs website. "These properties make RTMFP especially well suited for developing real-time collaboration applications by not only providing superior user experience but also reducing cost for operators."
Adobe says that in order to use RTMFP, the Flash Player endpoints (the individual audience members) need to connect to an RTMFP server, like the Stratus service.
Stratus 2 does not support media relay, shared objects or scripting, so it is only suitable for applications that involve Flash Players communicating directly with each other — as might occur in two-way webcam chats, or via P2P file distribution. This is in contrast to Adobe Flash Media Server with its more robust feature set — which receives the new P2P technology in its next release.