It’s been in public and private beta for quite some time now but today version 1 of the Adobe Media Player is live. I think AMP is a really good idea especially for “road-warriors” like myself. AMP allows broadcasters to easily push out ad-supported content to whoever is subscribed to it. Broadcasters can also easily skin the player and add commercials by using simple RSS-feeds and SMIL.

Once you subscribe to a feed, AMP (running on AIR) automatically downloads new episodes when they are available. Once downloaded, you can watch it wherever you want be it on the train, airplane or basically anywhere where you don’t have an internet connection. This really is what I want from online tv. I really think online tv right now is failing because of crappy internet in hotel rooms and public places. Having the ability to download your favorite shows over night would partly solve this since I would be able to watch it the next day.

I’ve actually built something like this myself. I have a MacMini at home that records my favorite shows (although not a lot of them) and then uploads them to my server. A little PHP script automatically makes an RSS feeds from whatever files are new in the video folder. In the morning I download my new shows and can then watch them whenever, wherever I want. That’s basically the idea behind AMP except in this case it’s the broadcasters publishing the new video content.

Together with AMP, we also just launched Adobe TV which has some really good tutorials on how to use Adobe products and you can also subscribe to the Adobe TV channel in AMP.