rocketpocket: Adobe abandoning Flash Player for TVs as well

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Adobe abandoning Flash Player for TVs as well

And the white-flag waving continues. Shortly after announcing the painful death of Flash Player for mobile devices, Adobe is also stepping back from the platform on another major pedestal: television. In a statement to GigaOM, Adobe said that it would "continue to support existing licensees who are planning on supporting Flash Player for web browsing on digital home devices and are using the Flash Player Porting Kit to do so," but that it felt the "right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience." The broader efforts to bring Flash to connected HDTVs, Blu-ray players etc. were all part of its Open Screen Project -- something the now-defunct Palm joined in 2009 -- which was established in order to allow developers to craft a single Flash app and distribute it across a number of devices. A perfectly acceptable initiative in theory, but it seems that traction has been hard to come by. One has to wonder what this means for products in the Google TV family, which obviously rely on Flash Player to bring a "complete" browsing experience to the tee-vee screen.

In related news, HTML5 could not be reached for comment, but close friends have affirmed that "snickering" and "belly laughs" could be heard coming from his Los Angeles hotel room.

Adobe abandoning Flash Player for TVs as well originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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