Less than 8 months after launching their Silverlight powered rich media video player, British broadcaster, ITV have dropped Microsoft’s rich streaming platform in favour of the more established, Adobe Flash Player.

According to a recent report from Adobe EMEA Flash Platform Evangelist Andrew Shorten, technical problems experienced by end-users, and the relatively low distribution of the the runtime, are partly to blame for ITV abandoning Microsoft’s rich streaming platform.

This week, at the 2009 IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) trade show in Amsterdam, Adobe Systems announced Flash Access 2.0. Formerly known as Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server (FMRMS), Flash Access is content protection software that lets video and audio authors control how, when, and where their content can be experienced by users – even after download.