Adobe, Akamai, Microsoft and other key players have been working on an open source video player, that will make it easier for developers to make custom Flash-based video players.

Adobe.TV is their first implementation. Beet TV interviewed one of Adobe's executives (above) about it. The back-end is powered by Adobe Coldfusion 9.

The initiative, called Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) emerged from Adobe's Strobe effort.

The OSMF provides a preintegrated stack of components for building a streaming video player that runs on top of Adobe's Flash brower plugin. It includes stream loading functionality, user interface classes, and other parts that are needed to build a video player.

Developers can take the components of the OSMF and add or modify it as needed to include additional functionality or give it custom look and feel. It eliminates the need to manually assemble the streaming functionaly when implementing custom players.

Open framework, propietary plugin

The source code is available under the terms of the open source Mozilla Public License (MPL). Adobe says that it intends to accept patches from third-party developers, meaning that the project is open to independent contributors.

Although OSMF is open source, the Flash player itself—the browser plugin that is used to run and display the content—still remains proprietary.

All the information is here.