New York — From Desktop to the TV, Adobe Flash, a multimedia platform for integrating animation and video into web pages, aims to bring rich Web animation and video into consumers’ living rooms. The company today plans to announce its latest version of its Flash multimedia platform that will essentially put its technology in Internet connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other digital home devices, a new option for the rapidly changing digital-home market.
On Monday, Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.
For consumers, what sounded like a bit of unimportant Internet tubing actually means that a long over-hyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.
Furthermore, the tech giant’s latest attempt on the platform will enable developers to start crafting a host of online video widgets for a new era of web-powered televisions, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes.
As part of the announcement, the company also signed up with a host of partners to support the technology, called the “Adobe Flash Platform” for the Digital Home. The new platform is available now to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and the first devices and processors that will support it should be available in the second half of the year, Adobe said.
Partners that have signed on to support the new version of Flash are Atlantic Records, Broadcom, Comcast, Disney Interactive Media Group, Intel, Netflix, STMicroelectronics, The New York Times Company, NXP Semiconductors and Sigma Designs.
So far, Adobe’s Flash has mainly been utilized to make video from sites like YouTube viewable from within the browser. With the growth of the smartphone market, Adobe also rolled out a mobile version of Flash designed for online video viewers on the go. And the company has been very successful in this market. About 80 percent of online videos worldwide are viewed using Adobe Flash technology, according to comScrore.
A mock-up of what Adobe Flash for TVs would like. (Credit: Adobe)
Industry analyst Ben Bajarin, director of consumer technology for Creative Strategies, said the news is significant because it makes Flash the first enabling technology to allow entertainment providers to stream content directly to televisions. Currently, the way to get this kind of content onto televisions is mainly by hooking up a PC to a TV or set-top box, he said.
Bajarin said Adobe also is approaching its digital home strategy from a different perspective than competitors. Rather than provide a PC with a media-enhanced OS, like Microsoft does with digital home-optimized PCs, Adobe wants to provide a software platform to take content directly from the Internet to TVs.
“It is more effective from a development platform that Adobe is approaching it,” he said. “They want [media companies] to consider how they develop this content and use Flash as the underlying architecture to provide streaming Web-based services to the TV.”
The new version of Flash also will allow content to be sent directly to set-top boxes and Blu-ray media players from the Internet, Adobe said.
Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., is among the oldest Internet powers but perhaps one of the least visible to users. Founded in 1983, the company first developed a common language for laser printers called PostScript and later built or bought popular desktop publishing tools like Illustrator and Photoshop.
In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia, the originator of Flash, and expanded from making software to create and share digital documents, like Adobe Acrobat and the PDF file format, to dominating the budding market of tools to create online graphics and video. Last year the company reported net income of $871.8 million on revenue of $3.6 billion.
However, today’s announcement will allow developers to leverage Adobe’s Flashruntime to supply similar rich-media apps — like dynamically updated online video players, and animated widgets — to a slew of HD-ready living room devices.