September 29, 2009
What Should I Choose? Adobe Flash Or Microsoft Silverlight?
Adobe is a worldwide renowned name which practically stands for quality photo and video editing software. It is however its freebie, Flash, that is used most extensively. We are actually depending on Flash technology when we view videos on a lot of websites and web servers.
According to a report in the New York Times, Adobe is expanding Flash to the television (TV) screen and this piece of news will soon be revealed by Adobe at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.
Users will no longer be restricted to viewing videos on the PC and phones. It will be possible to watch the same videos on TV screens once flash technology is TV-compatible. Later in 2009, you should be able to find TVs and set top boxes which support the Flash format on shelf racks in the US, as Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen predicted.
Bud Albers, the CTO of Disney, said that his company supports the idea of extending Flash to televisions. He commented that “Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it. This gets us where we want to go.”
Apart from the users, Adobe benefits the most from the extension. In 2008, Adobe reported an income of $871.8 million and a revenue of $3.6 million. It is making a huge profit from Flash by selling Flash application building software as well as video building software to media creators. It is not surprising that Flash can be found on nearly all computers and Flash users watch 80% of web videos by using this technology.
Silverlight, which has greater support for HD 1080p video content as claimed by Microsoft, is a product of Microsoft used to substitute Flash.
Microsoft commented that HD capability would become the mainstream format for videos in the future. Brad Becker from Microsoft (who is a former executive of Adobe) said he “can’t imagine what could be more important on a television than high video quality.”
Microsoft may just be structuring the connection between the PC and the TV more successfully. Adobe should finally be expecting a tough competition after all these years.
Filed under Business by
