Adobe is raising the curtain on Project "Primetime" this morning, an integrated video platform positioned to be a single workflow for premium video providers deploying across multiple devices. Primetime combines Adobe's traditional streaming and publishing technologies with video ad management from Auditiude (acquired last November) and analytics/optimization from Omniture (acquired in Oct. '09). Primetime will rollout throughout 2012, but today Adobe is making available the first piece - "Primetime Highlights," a web-based video clip editor integrated with Auditude so that media companies can quickly create and publish ad-supported clips from live events.

As Ashley Still, Adobe's director of product management, video solutions, explained to me last week, Primetime's key goal is to enable premium video providers to deliver the highest-quality "TV-like" experiences with seamless, dynamic ad insertion into linear/live/on-demand streams on any connected device. Adobe believes that today's content and ad delivery model, which often requires multiple workflows and products to interoperate, will not allow premium online and mobile video to effectively scale and monetize.

For example, Ashley noted that because video providers today mainly receive their content and ad reporting separately, they're unable to optimize ads based on viewers' content choices. The vision for Primetime is that customers will receive integrated reporting for how their videos and the ads that ran against them performed. Omniture's SiteCatalyst data on individual viewers' consumption behaviors will inform which specific video ads should run, and then Auditude will dynamically insert them. Content providers can also use the data to do A/B testing on different ads and ad loads, optimizing them in real time. For both content providers and advertisers, all of this portends greater sophistication in their content and ad serving, which should be pretty enticing.

For now though, the first implementation, Primetime Highlights, is targeted mainly to content providers who deliver live events. With Primetime Highlights, content providers can create clips and associated metadata, and have specific ads associated, all while the live event continues (see video below for a demo). Adobe has a player component to publish the clips for iPad viewing, and customers can also publish the clips to the web using their preferred online video publishing platform.

Aside from Primetime, Adobe is also announcing that Auditude has gained accreditation from the Media Ratings Council for ads delivered by its platform, that Adobe Access 4 (previously known as Adobe Flash Access) will now also support HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) content in native iOS apps and that Adobe will support the emerging MPEG-DASH streaming standards.