Flash Media Streaming Server is a powerful and secure video and audio streaming solution for Flash Player, AIR and Flash Lite. This server is designed to deliver live video and video on demand to Flash Player. It includes two built-in streaming services, live and video on demand (vod), which let you deliver live or recorded content to clients. Flash Media Streaming Server offers a client API that lets you develop Flash Player, AIR, or Flash Lite solutions that use live and vod services. This server edition is not intended for high-performance, highly scalable, or custom video solutions.

Flash Media Streaming Server provides two streaming services: live streaming media and video on demand streaming media. You can create clients that use these services to stream live video to an unlimited number of clients. A live stream could be time delimited, like a short event, or always on, like a television or radio station. Recorded video could be anything from short commercials, movie trailers, and music videos to television programs and full-length movies.

Flash Media Interactive Server is a powerful, secure, extendable, and scalable solution for delivering streaming media and interactive applications such as video recorders and multiplayer games or DVR-enabled live streams 12for Flash Player, AIR, and Flash Lite. The server offers an SDK that lets you develop media applications in Server-Side Adobe® ActionScript® and client-side ActionScript. You can also develop plug‑ins in C++ that extend the built-in functionality of the server. Flash Media Interactive Server also can be configured to run as an edge server that manages connections and bandwidth, and caches content closer to clients so you can scale your deployment easily.

Flash Media Interactive Server provides the same streaming services as Flash Media Streaming Server. In addition, with Flash Media Interactive Server, you can use Server-Side and client-side ActionScript to develop new video services or interactive applications that stream audio and video that users generate, such as video blogging and messaging and personal video broadcast sites. This edition of the server also supports DVR functionality to enable instant replay or catch-up streaming solutions. You can also create real-time media applications that let users chat or collaborate in real time. Flash Media Interactive Server is the upgrade from Flash Media Streaming Server.

Flash Media Interactive Server is also designed for broadcasting data to large groups of users (for example, in an online game). You can also use the server to create interactive applications with live video and collaboration applications like Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™.

Flash Media Development Server is a limited, free edition of Flash Media Interactive Server that can be used to develop new applications for Flash Media Interactive Server or, in production, to implement basic low-volume streaming or social media solutions. The server can be used in production to leverage the new multipoint publish feature, which enables you to create a live publishing point on a network, inject data messages into a stream, and push the stream to a Content Delivery Network. Flash Media Development Server has no functionality limit, but it is limited to 10 simultaneous connections.

The following table compares the features in each server edition (features supported by all server editions are not listed):