Adobe launches its bid for desktop video real estate in Las Vegas Monday at NAB: Adobe Media Player, a free standalone player designed to work online and offline with heavy reliance on RSS. (It’s also cross-platform—Windows and Macs.) For Adobe, it’s a chance to complete what company executives described during an interview as a Flash “triple play”—adding the desktop to 700+plus million browser players and 200+ enabled mobile devices (company stats).

I’ll leave it to others to get into the tech and developer aspects ... what intrigues me most is the potential for portability. Currently, major media outlets tend to offer full-length episodes as ad-supported streams online or downloads for sale. What’s missing, for the most part, is a format that provides ad-supported portability beyond clips. Adobe Media Player aims squarely at that space with an offline ad model. Craig Barberich, group product manager, explained that the player includes content protection—one variation would be identity-based, locked down to the individual user/machine, another is more flexible, high-quality playback and dynamic skinning based on content. It also promises a variety of ways to offer advertising: banners; bugs/overlays (warning to advertisers: the bugs can get annoying fast); text based; pre-mid-post roll; etc. Media companies can create “pods”—quasi-widgets—using flash and html. Ads also can update at viewing.

Metrics: Adobe is promising serious metrics tools but also says users will have the right to opt out of certain tracking.

Competition: Adobe is counting on Flash to be the difference; AMP is the only desktop player that can play back Flash. As for internet start-ups, Barberich said, “they don’t necessarily have the ability to do offline. They don’t have the history and ecosystem.” (The WSJ (sub. req.) has a good look at the increasingly intense competition between Adobe and Microsoft.)

RSS: The subscription delivery format is “key” to the AMP. “It’s about turning surfers into subscribers. ... Video RSS aggregation is really core to our vision.”

Timing: Monday’s announcement is just a preview. A public beta is expected in late spring. A webcast of Adobe’s announcements at NAB will be available here.