The business case for switching to the Adobe Player

Lets face it, iTunes exists primarily to help Apple sell music, movies, and iPods. Yes Apple did a great job loading up the service with free content in the first couple of releases to build market share. Now that it has that market share, finding and downloading the free content is becoming much more difficult. 

Adobe's Media Player takes an entirely different, and much more business friendly, approach. So far, all of the content provided by Adobe TV (the on-line channel associated with the player) is free.  Adobe plans to make money by helping companies brand their video and/or to embed advertising within the content.  The Media Player is based around a new programming environment (AIR) which gives content providers a great deal of control over the look and feel of both the video and the player.  Adobe will also provide much more complete tracking info than you can get from iTunes or YouTube. For example, Adobe can tell you when a user has watched a whole video or cut off watching half way through.  Adobe will also work with content providers to help them embed and get paid for advertising.  

If you want your video to be seen by a lot of people, submit it to iTunes or YouTube.  If you want more control over the look and feel of that content, or want to embed advertising and track the demographics of who is watching your videos you might want to talk to Adobe.