Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder lets you capture audio and video while streaming it live to Flash Media Server. You can use anything from a webcam to a sophisticated digital video camera to capture the video. For more information about Flash Media Live Encoder, see www.adobe.com/go/learn_fms_fme_en.

To broadcast media to a large number of viewers, use multipoint publishing. This feature streams the live video from a camera to a publishing server, and then to a broadcast server. The broadcast server is often a Content Delivery Network.

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A.

Live video

B.

Flash Media Live Encoder (or custom-build Flash Player or AIR solutions)

C.

Flash Media Server

D.

Flash Player, AIR, or Flash Lite clients

Multipoint publishing can be used to inject metadata into a live stream. For example, you could create an Internet TV station and publish the stream to a Flash Media Development server. The development server would publish the stream to a CDN that pushes the stream to millions of users.

To deliver recorded video, or “video on demand”, Adobe provides a video player called the FLVPlayback component, which supports playback of FLV and MP4/F4V files. Flash Media Server 3.5 also installs with a sample video player of production quality (RootInstall/samples/videoPlayer. You can also develop your own video player. Video players run in Flash Player or AIR and stream recorded or live video from Flash Media Server.

The following are examples of the type of content you can stream:

• Short video clips, such as commercials up to 30 seconds long

• Longer video clips, such as user-generated videos up to 30 min. long

• Recorded television shows or movies up to several hours long

• Client-side or server-side media playlists can play a list of streams in a sequence, whether live streams, recorded streams, or a mix. The playlist can be in a client-side script or, on Flash Media Interactive Server, in a server-side script.

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  A.

  Flash Media Server streams recorded media to clients.

  B.

  Internet (RTMP)

  C.

  Flash Player, AIR, or Flash Lite run the video players

A streaming video application can insert advertising at various points, such as a short commercial that plays before a recorded television show or live video. The advertisement is often streamed from one server and the content is streamed from another server or from a Content Delivery Network. A video-with-advertising application typically connects to the ad server, streams the ad, and then closes the connection to the ad server. It then connects to the content server, streams the content, and closes that connection, repeating this sequence each time video is streamed.

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A.

Live video

B.

Flash Media Server (serving recorded and live content)

C.

Flash Player, AIR, or Flash Lite clients

D.

Flash Media Server (serving ads)

A Flash Media Interactive Server application can engage the user through video sharing, online chat, web conferencing, and other community-building features. Users can send audio and video as well as text messages to the server, and the server streams the data to all connected users. The server can also record media for playback at a later time, such as in a video messaging application.

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A.

Clients can send and receive audio and video and data messages.

B.

Flash Media Interactive Server broadcasts the media and data to all connected users.