Adobe is coming at us with some shockers! Adobe earlier reported that it was canceling development of mobile Flash but now a new report came that it will end it for TV’s as well. The company will continue to support the products out there but there will no more Flash TV apps! GigaOM reported that Adobe will ask hardware TV makers to build their own apps and not on Flash. Adobe also hinted that Google TV took a wrong focus on the web by deploying Flash.
“We believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path,” Adobe said. Flash was recently launched on LG TVs but with little success. Google TV has been the major user for Flash until now and looks like it will have to soon give up on it.Google TV 2.0 actually has more of a native apps approach rather than Flash apps on it.
Some products such as Boxee Box will not be affected by this, they will continue to use desktop-level Flash through the web which is shown on the TV.
[Source]
It’s curious that this comes at a time when GoogleTV recently announced a major update to Android 3.1, which unlike the previous GoogleTV v1 (Android 2.1), now has native support for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), the open source protocol that Apple created to replace Flash for video streaming on all iOS devices… Is it just coincidence that while GoogleTV was running v1, and the only way of delivering live video within the browser was using Flash, Adobe stated:
“The digital home is a huge step for Flash and it represents an amazing new screen for developers and content creators to bring rich interactive content to the TV.”
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/flash_player_101_on_google_tv.html
And now that GoogleTV does have a solid alternative, and it’s actually the same alternative that Apple used from the beginning (and probably an alternative other vendors will use too), Adobe states:
“However we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience”
Perhaps we should read between the lines… Adobe is basically saying: if our Flash platform is the only available option, then the future of connected TVs is Flash; if an alternative to Flash (specially one created by Apple) comes in place, then Flash is dead, the browser for connected TVs is dead, and we should all start developing apps instead -using Adobe AIR, of course!