Adobe And Time Warner: Another Big Step

Adobe announced what it calls an alliance with Time Warner, today, saying that Time Warner will fully embrace Adobe's Flash and video tools for Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., and HBO. As announcements go, I'm not all that partial to those touting new alliances, but this one adds snugly to the list of entertainment companies evolving their business models as advertisers Nip/Tuck some of their broadcast TV dollars.Let me pause for just a moment of unspin. First, these three divisions are going to use pretty much every piece of Adobe's Flash and video platforms (as Adobe touts it: "from planning to playback"). In return, Time Warner will provide feedback on what it wants to see in digital rights management and monetization. Sounds like a vendor-customer relationship to me.

But this is good. Microsoft has made a big deal of its recent Silverlight wins, including CBS March Madness on Demand. We all sort of take Adobe's dominance for granted, so while yet another Flash or Streaming Server customer might seem humdrum, let's call a big deal a big deal: an alliance it is.

What Adobe has said in this announcement is that the companies will work together on some of the hottest, most controversial, and unsolved problems in online entertainment. Adobe's rights management software, unveiled at this time last year, sounds warm and fuzzy to any company trying to protect its content, especially companies like HBO, which has quite a different model: paid content. Adobe says that it combines the best in encryption with flexible business logic (so a content owner can limit the frequency of playback, for example).

If these companies want their online revenue to one day exceed their broadcast revenue, they'll need to quickly figure out how to analyze traffic in a post-Nielsen world. While this surely scares the vampire slayer out of many executives, it should, instead, excite them. Finally, they'll be able to tell advertisers so much more about their audience, viewing habits, and create interactive advertising experiences. It's already happening.

But that also means they actually have to extract that vital audience information which, it turns out, isn't so easy to get. Video viewing metrics, and the analytics technology to gather them, are, essentially, a guessing exercise right now. Raw streams, and even average viewing time are rudimentary, but beyond that, advertisers aren't quite sure what they want to know, other than someone watched their ad; and content companies are ill-equipped to help because there aren't Omniture equivalents yet.

So onward. Ally. But tell us what you learn. Anyone. We're waiting.