Adobe Announces Open Screen Project

May 1st, 2008

Author: Michael Krotscheck

Category: News

Tags: adobe, flash, flv, open screen project, open source, strategy, swf

This morning (well, at 12:01 AM) Adobe announced a large cross-industry collaborative effort called the Open Screen Project. According to the marketing boilerplate, it is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.

What it really means is the following:

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

This was more of a licensing restriction if I’m not mistaken, meaning any device manufacturer can now make use of these formats. In practice you might see native (or embedded) implementations of .swf or .flv, including, say, your Tivo, Streaming Video on your XBox, PSP, Nokia, etc etc etc.

Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player

Flash Player has been annoying to push to other devices, largely because of the ridiculous number of handhelds that are out there. Getting it working for so many devices has been, quite simply, impractical, so instead they’ve opened up the lower level device calls of the flash player so anyone can port their own.

This particular one I find the most compelling, because of the names that are notably not on the list of partners: Google, Apple and Microsoft. Whether they are still in talks with these companies or not I honestly don’t know, but given that between the iPhone, Google Android and Windows Mobile they have significant sway in the device industry, not having them on the list seems a little odd. Mind you, everyone else is on that list, so I’m wondering if Adobe’s trying to use the community to strongarm those three into adopting their runtime. Consider consumer A, who sees all kind of neat Flash/AIR apps on other devices, but doesn’t see them on his iPhone or his Windows Mobile device. Is he more likely to move? Would someone else be less likely to leave? I don’t know, but the strategic play by play will be very interesting to watch.

Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

We’ve heard rumors about this, but having these protocols public and formally supported by Adobe (rather than reverse engineered by the community) is a pretty big deal. Open projects like BlazeDS, AMFPHP and WebOrb can now support the entire protocol layers, and I think we’ll soon see live video streaming options for all of those platforms.

Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Up until recently, Flash for a handheld device cost money. Soon, it won’t. There’s not much to this other than removal of the barriers to adoption for the consumer, and many handheld devices may come with the flash player pre-installed.