Generally--at least as far as the viewing public is concerned--the Emmy Awards are all about Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Modern Family and stars and celebrities showing up in borrowed outfits and jewelry for their moment on the red carpet. Adobe, those guys who help present video on non-television screens, aren't generally considered part of the mix.
This year, though, Adobe was right there with Damien Lewis, Claire Danes and Jon Cryer, picking up a statue for excellence in the television business. And, while the performers may come and go, Adobe's win was for something that's coming and should be around forever: TV Everywhere authentication.
The award for prime time engineering was awarded to Adobe Pass, a product that lets consumers automatically log onto television programs on multiple IP-connected devices using an authentication process to prove they're actually paying customers.
"With TV Everywhere we do have coverage of 97 percent of pay TV households," said Campbell Foster, director of product marketing for Adobe's Project Primetime, during an interview with FierceIPTV. "The challenge is getting the operators to make the consumers aware of the technology and help them understand what their user name and password is. For TV Everywhere, consumer awareness is the ongoing challenge."
For Adobe, consumer awareness of an Emmy win is less important than making its customers aware of the value of its technology in authenticating subscribers to use multiple IP-connected devices to view video. It's a problem that the company has worked on for the past two years with Adobe Pass, leading up to the Emmy win.
Perhaps the biggest reason for Adobe's success was the success of another event generally not thought to be part of any engineering accomplishment: the Summer Olympic Games. Adobe maintains that its product, which it says has been embraced by 150 U.S. multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), really hit its stride with last summer's Olympics Games in London where "NBC did have live streams into apps with full advertising all enabled by Adobe," Foster said.
For more:
- see this story from BeetTV
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