Adobe Bringing Flash to TVs This Year

Author	Hugo Jobling
Published	20th Apr 2009

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Internet-video fans will be pleased to hear Adobe has secured a deal to see Flash decoding brought to chips from Broadcom, Intel, NXT and STMicroelectronics. Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home should appear on Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, embedded into TVs and on other, similar consumer electronics devices.

Sony and Samsung TVs notably aren't covered by the deal. Hopefully separate agreements can be reached there! Content providers such as Netflix Disney and the New York Times have given Adobe their support which is great, but probably won't be of much benefit to those of us not in the US.

Adobe reckons around 80 per cent of online video is delivered using Flash, which it also claims is installed on 98 per cent of PCs, so the proposition that a large number of TVs will offer native decoding is pretty exciting. Especially given the increasing number of televisions which are touting Internet access as a major feature - widgets seem to be the buzzword of 2009.

Adobe also says it would like to see Flash video support on the Xbox 360. Both the Wii and PlayStation 3 already support Flash in their embedded web browsers; something the Xbox doesn't have making its adoption of Flash arguably less important.

Now if only Adobe would hurry up and get Flash on the iPhone!

Link:
Adobe.

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Agent 6131 said on 20th April 2009

Why would TV manufacturers do this to us? I was looking forward to flash finally dying!!!

DITTO for the Flash on the iPhone comment, are you crazy that is one of the... more

Xiphias said on 20th April 2009

It is technically the misuse of flash that's annoying, flash video players like youtube seem to work reasonably well.

Unfortunately this move is just likely to ... more