TV's to get Flash-ier

Posted on 20-04-2009

Adobe has already gained a market dominance as far as on-line interactive content is concerned. Its Flash plug-in is now present in over 99% of the Internet-enabled computers. With a lite Flash player on almost every recent mobile, and some even supporting the full fledged player, Flash will undoubtedly be around for a long time.

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Now Adobe Flash is out to engrave itself in yet another market, Television. As part of Adobe's Open Screen Project, it made available the format specifications for its SWF, FLV, and AMF formats, meaning that now any company can create applications which can play, edit or create flash content. Another effort of the OpenScreen project is to implement hardware comparability across devices, for the full flash player. Efforts are also underway to port Flash Payer to the iPhone. Flash Player 9 is available in PS3 from v2.5, Nintendo Wii supports Flash 7, and there are certain hacks available to run it on the Xbox 360 as well.

This has great potential, as the major amount of video available on the net is delivered using Flash. With companies like Marvel, NBC, BBC, MTV etc supporting it, content is likely to be plentiful. Digital TV and Set-top devices which support Flash will also be able to access the plethora of content available of Flash-based video sites such as Hulu, Dailymotion, MySpace, and of course YouTube. Recently Disney, Netflix, Interactive Media Group, Atlantic Records and The New York Times have decided to offer content for this platform.

As most digital television and set-top boxes support Internet connections we can soon expect the whole cable business to be a thing of the past. What this means for us Indians though, this that we have wait for yet another awesome thing to become obsolete before we get to use it.

Source: InformationWeek