Largely by virtue of its support from YouTube, which some say supplies four-fifths of the Web's streaming video, Adobe Flash is the de facto delivery standard for video through Web pages. While content creators have been urging Google and other video hosts to implement better controls over how unauthorized content can become so freely distributed, Adobe is now working on a way to enable those creators to post or host their own Flash video, in a way that they and only they are in control of the distribution process -- including, who gets to see those videos and for how much.

The next edition of Adobe's rights management server, now called Flash Access 2.0, was unveiled today at a broadcasting conference in Amsterdam. This while Silverlight -- perhaps Flash's most direct competitor in the functionality department, but still representing a very small slice of the global viewer base -- demonstrates its next version as well, with very similar goals. Today, Adobe said its next version of the Flash Player will be required for Web users to view videos that content owners produce specifically for customers.

Flash Access will support a variety of business models, including video on-demand and on-the-spot sales. But key to the viability of this technology will be how it manages and maintains contact with the customer. That's why there's a lot of attention being paid to Adobe's latest Flash feature: a built-in mechanism for encrypting the stream, using essentially the same philosophy as an SSL connection. With session key-style encryption, only the intended customer will be able to access content intended for her; and she may not even get it until after she pays for it. And that same encryption may also be able to prevent unauthorized recording -- or, more technically accurately, enabling the recording of static since the session key would only be valid for a limited time.

Today, Adobe said it plans to make Flash Access available to content providers either through conventional means -- as an SDK enabling Web content hosts to integrate it into their servers -- or as a service hosted by other Adobe partners to which content providers may subscribe. Already, a cottage industry exists for third parties who build encryption tools for Flash, but up until now, their purpose has generally been to protect users from decrypting and decompiling built-in Shockwave content. This time, Adobe's purpose is to facilitate a market, by enabling newer Flash content to not be free. The company says this encryption will work with legacy Flash content (FLV) as well as more recent H.264 encoded files, although again, users will need the latest viewer.

Adobe has already experimented with its own Media Player, with content portals designed to encourage providers to sell videos. Its success has been variable up to now, but largely because users prefer to access video content through their browsers and not a separate program -- Microsoft has learned the same lesson with its Media Player. Today's announcement suggests that Adobe may be planning to embed some of the content broker functionality it created for AMP, in the next edition of its Flash player add-on. That could mean the add-on gets bigger, and it could also mean that some of that functionality could end up "in your face," as it were, whenever you access YouTube.

Concern has also been expressed in some circles today about the more direct customer relationships Adobe's new system would require. Content providers in particular have been wary of how viewers are capable of receiving unauthorized streams by way of proxy servers -- "anonymizers" that protect users' identities and make it impossible for servers to track viewing habits. Encrypted sessions and DRM protection in Flash could conceivably lead to a certain class of videos that anonymous users cannot view via proxy servers even if they tried.

In any event, today's announcement comes as further bad news for the open source community, which has suffered setbacks in its efforts to endow Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome with built-in video codecs based on open standards. Although Google purchased the company responsible for the technology behind Ogg Theora, the leading open-source codec to date, Google's technologists' low opinions of that codec are already on record. If more content providers come to rely upon a video delivery technology that requires a browser plug-in, the likelihood of a ubiquitous built-in video standard for browsers diminishes.

Adobe expects Flash Access 2.0 to be commercially available in H1 2010.