I’m turning the floor over to Adobe‘s Jim Guerard for this posting. For Jim–formerly of Macromedia (and Hyperion Press!)–it’s been a heady couple of years watching Flash converge with the needs of the Internet video marketplace (something Jim has only so much direct say over)…and watching Flash converge with the increasingly integrated Adobe workflow (something Jim can influence). For me, the promising soundbyte was this: “CS3 makes Flash a first-class citizen in all the Creative Suite apps”. The idea that Flash is an equal format in CS3 (and other places) says a lot about how close we’re getting to multimedia reality. We’ll see how Adobe’s contribution to the revolution plays out once our reviewers and readers dig into the product. In the meantime, show news included an announcement from the BBC that they were standardizing on CS3, so we can also watch the business model play out there. Here’s Jim’s take:

“We’ve been out in front of the curve for a couple of years now providing the vision of how distribution of rich media was going to evolve. It’s exciting for me to see the realization of that belief across the industry. In particular it’s refreshing to see how fast Adobe is delivering against that vision. This show is a showcase for us. From a creative tools side, it’s the biggest release in the history of the company–CS3. It’s a particulary open cross platform execution, it takes us back to the Mac, it’s a suite of tools that provides continued leadership in integration and features. We’ve also got the integration of Macromedia technologies and Flash in particular. You can create in Encore for DVD, then tweak in that same file for your online deliverable and save out to Flash as a version. You can move your work among apps in whatever way you’re comfortable with, knowing that your Flash deliverable is an iteration just like any of your other deliverables–not something you do again from scratch. The pipeline becomes workflow/business plan driven not technology driven.

“From a distribution standpoint you can ‘create once’ in this extensive, cross platform environment–editing, digital audio, motion graphcs, etc. and then take it to film–as Rob Legato and Ron Ames do for Scorsese, or Stu does at The Orphanage–or take it to broadcast as the BBC will be doing, or to disc, blu-ray, and of course Flash. Starting this summer with the new Adobe Media player you’ll be able to deploy that experience on or offline, connected or not, with or without DRM, and across mobile devices in the same on or offline model.

“All this allows you to monetize your content in really interesting ways. You can use new types of advertising, branding and tracking enabled by the player itself–some are familar like lower thirds and PIP, others more non-traditional. You can deploy new kinds of interactivity driven by the kind of non-linear access and social networking capabilties that people are used to from My Space and other networking sites–those sites proved the power of community in a pretty spectacular way. You can do VOD, pay per view, tiered and gated content…to me this really is what people were talking about when they said interactive TV. That lean-forward experience that offers mutliple points of access and types of experiences depending on user preference.

“You’ve had talk and hypothetical demos of interactive TV but it had to deliver on two fronts–the player side and the creative tools to back it up. So think about it–some of the most ubiquitous and powerful creative tools in the industry–Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects–now become the tools of interactive TV.

“In a few months, with the new player and the release of the Apollo platform, we add powerful web apps–HTML, Acrobat, Flash content creation tools–into the mix. So you’re talking about one common environment that spans video content creation and web content creation. And it delivers connected experiences outside the desktop on the browser, online or off–for example you’ll reconnect and resync. So that fundamentally changes the way collaborators communicate with each other, how businesses communicate with markets, and how content creators communicate with audiences and vice versa.

“Being able to tap into this stream–given the installed base of Flash and the pedigree of the content creation tools–allows this industry to respond to the astonishing changes in the media landscape.”