The Day Has Come – Adobe Opens up RTMP

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I’m really happy to be able to blog that Adobe is opening up the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) spec. As a lot of you probably know, RTMP forms a core part of the Flash Platform ecosystem. It is the backbone protocol for delivering real time data and rich media to the Flash Player. Now it will be available for any developer to implement in their own tools, server technologies, or projects.

As the Flash Platform has grown, Adobe as a company has pushed harder and harder to be both more innovative and more open. You see this in everything from open source Flex to open specifications like AMF and XMP and PDF. Part of the reason we can continue to open up is the fact that we are able to build value added services to our customers on top of our open technology. RTMP is no different.

The Digital Media group at Adobe has done some great things with RTMP. Over the past couple of years they introduced a variety of secure RTMP measures including an encrypted version of RTMP called RTMPE which enabled content providers to protect their content while allowing it to be consumed by the 98% of computers that have the Flash Player. These types of secure RTMP measures are what makes sites like Hulu possible – because the people that create content feel confident they can protect it while making it freely available.

These security measures are examples of technologies that Adobe built on top of RTMP, and they aren’t part of the core spec that we’re opening up. In general, this is even better news for developers. Adobe spent a lot of work creating those and we think we have a great solution to protect people’s content. But there are no rules in how developers should implement things like security or peer-to-peer functionality in the open RTMP spec – we’re leaving it up to developers to decide how they want to implement it. That helps Adobe’s offerings by expanding the entire RTMP ecosystem and fostering healthy competition for the best solution. Any user of the Flash Platform, from developers to the end users, is going to benefit.

So today Adobe is expanding the community around RTMP by continuing to be as open as possible and foster both innovation and healthy competition. When you think about everything RTMP provides – the data, the video, the audio – and think about all of the possibilities that now exist for 3rd parties and developers, it’s hard not to get excited. This is going to provide an explosion of innovation for the community around the Flash Platform.

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  • http://www.psyked.co.uk James

    Just trying to understand this – it’s a Real-Time data transfer thing – like streaming webcams, for example?

    Is it the same thing as the Peer-to-Peer stuff that was demoed in the MAX day 2 Keynote?

  • http://www.bobjim.com Ryan Campbell

    So, will RTMP support be added to BlazeDS?

  • http://captsolo.net/info/ Uldis Bojars

    Just yesterday I published a summary of links to RTMP implementations and specs (re-engingeered by Red5 and other open source efforts): http://tr.im/bc7q

    This is good news from Adobe and I can’t wait until I can amend the link list with the official RTMP spec.