Just what we fans of online video need…another battle for a new standard for online video. Oy.

Adobe announced today that they will be releasing a new codec called Adobe Media Player for us to watch videos on our PC’s and Macs. Microsoft, not to be outdone in such a critical component of any technology behemoth, promises us Silverlight.

Silverlight promises to be cross platform and cross-browser compatible. Silverlight was previously refered to as the WPF/E standard. Silverlight is said to be able to run on macs or pcs (with linux boxes under consideration) and playable in IE, Safari, and Firefox environments.

Silverlight apparantly is based on WMV so it will be interesting to learn just how different than WMV Silverlight will become.

Adobe has not earned a lot of love from a category of users as much of their software is termed to be ‘bloated’ an obvious reference to system resources hogging. I personally have not experience much detrimental effects but there are well noted problems elsewhere such as here and here.  But you gotta love Flash so I dunno.

What is interesting is Adobe’s code-named Apollo. Apollo is purported to allow users to build Flash programs resident on PC’s but pull information from the web. Interesting.