Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats

[mj]

The Open Screen Project is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Specifically, this work will include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Adobe - Open Screen Project


This is really going to open things up regarding flash-enabled websites!

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[phio]

? Will this force users to upgrade their browsers to get these features, or will the flash features run with IE6?

[mj]

Originally Posted by phio

? Will this force users to upgrade their browsers to get these features, or will the flash features run with IE6?

No, what this is about is that Adobe is removing licensing restrictions for the flash file formats and they are even going a step further to share their platform specific porting knowledge to the general public.

What this means in practice is that flash can be used on all sorts of platforms where it was previously not allowed - phones, watches, toasters :-) And Adobe is even going to show you how to make it run on those platforms.

The thing where this will help the most is with flash authoring tools, which have traditionally been expensive and only run on windows. Now that developers have the full flash file format specifications and porting knowledge, they will be able to create flash authoring software for linux, mac, etc. and it can potentially even be free or very low cost as their aren't any royalties to Adobe involved anymore.

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[phio]

Very interesting. Will this increase the value of flash programmers?

I've always wanted a flashy watch!

[mj]

Originally Posted by phio

Very interesting. Will this increase the value of flash programmers?

I've always wanted a flashy watch!

I think this will increase the demand for flash authoring as the available platforms to run flash will increase. If that happens, then flash programmers will be in shorter demand.

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