Saturday, April 12, 2008

A Rival to iTunes?!

Adobe has just launched its new Media Player and it looks like quite an impressive Air application. This is a self-contained application that allows you to subscribe to a wide variety of media feeds, and no doubt will be a key RSS delivery mechanism for many content producers.

Finally, we may have an HD alternative to low resolution Google Video and YouTube. Will it soon rival iTunes in popularity? If you have Adobe Air pre-installed, the ease of download/installation indicates that Adobe is off to a running start!

I'm thinking it might be worth a teacher's time to set up a site for hosting media content that could be subscribed through this media player. Whether posting professional development content, self-produced teacher media, or exemplars of student work, this medium could take electronic portfolios to a whole new level. Then again, how long might it take for schools to make available applications for publishing or subscribing to media content?

The screencast below is a real-time, first visit installation that was almost too easy!

1 comments:

Doug said...

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I've had all kinds of issues with Air apps under Vista. The Adobe help site talks about issues with Vista but doesn't offer solutions.