Adobe and its P2P Ambitions

Excerpted from GigOM Report by Om Malik

Adobe Systems, owner of Flash multimedia technology, seems to be getting serious about spreading its tentacles into new product categories – from VoIP to P2P networking. But it is P2P that is at the heart of the company’s grand design.

In pursuit of this strategy, the company has acquired amicima, a privately held start-up founded in 2004 to “develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and P2P networking, and to develop new applications based on these protocols.”

Amicima’s publicly available product is amiciPhone, a P2P-based VoIP client that combines presence, text messaging, and file transfers with voice chat.

Adobe also recently announced a partnership with DCIA Member VeriSign, owner of the Kontiki grid content distribution platform. Earlier this month, VeriSign told us, “We will be collaborating with Adobe for delivery of Flash video including movies, TV shows, broadcast media, and user interface technologies.”

The two companies expect to work together to integrate future versions of next generation media technologies leveraging VeriSign’s Kontiki P2P technology and Adobe’s award winning Flash Video software.

Adobe could bundle Kontiki’s command-and-control P2P technology into a forthcoming version of Flash. Given the wide scale adoption of Flash, Adobe-Kontiki will be able to create an Internet-wide P2P cloud.

Publishers are expected to be able to lower their development, quality assurance, and customer support costs because the combined Flash/VeriSign service reduces the problems of deploying video on-demand applications across multiple platforms and browsers.

The Adobe-VeriSign combo could also help overcome some of the issues surrounding the current torrent-based content distribution systems.