April 20, 2009

On Monday, Adobe is expected to announce that at the end of 2009, the digital living room will likely support flash and Flash-based applications.

Specifically, Adobe has convinced a wide swath of leading technology companies to support a new, optimized Flash Lite runtime for a number of chips that will form the foundation of connected TVs, DVD players, game consoles, and digital media adapters.

Adobe executives said they believe that the technology will be available by the holiday 2009 season within the U.S., and will be first installed directly into televisions. However, they also cautioned that services that take advantage of the new technology may roll out over time.

The new runtime will be announced at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, where Adobe will also announce Adobe Strobe, a new, more consistent way if developing Flash-based video applications for the Web; Adobe Premiere Pro 4.1, with support for the RED camera format, and Adobe Story; a method of collaborating with other scriptwriters. Adobe Story also has one rather clever advantage for content creators: the script can be tied to the video itself, serving to create closed captioning and also as an additional source of metadata.

The Flash Lite runtime, however, serves a definitive step forward for the digital living room, and a contrast to Intel and Yahoo, which launched the Yahoo Widget Engine for digital televisions at the 2008 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. It also is the standard that Microsoft's Silverlight was designed to unseat, although Microsoft has yet to demonstrate a version that can run on televisions.

More importantly, Flash is also the underlying technology for most of the Web's video sites. About eighty percent of all videos are encoded in Flash, and Adobe boasts 98 percent penetration on the desktop, executives said.

Adobe's current push is in smart phones: the latest Flash 10 platform will be ported to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, and the Palm Web OS by the end of the year, according to Anup Murarka, director of partner development and technology strategy for the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. He declined to comment on a Blackberry port.