Flash Comes To The Set-Top Box And TV - Connected Home News - Digital Trends

Flash Comes To The Set-Top Box And TV - Connected Home News - Digital Trends

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Comment: Flash is a designers wet dream. It promises ease of development and the possibility to run huge amounts of existing content. Adobe is certainly serious about this. Its Creative Suite allegedly contributes about 60% of revenue but sales have topped out, meaning they need new markets. Adobe is suffering and has closed offices twice this year, for a week each time, to save costs. This is a determined and co-ordinated push into DTV to generate new revenue. Adobe therefore are deadly serious.

Yet, I'm sceptical. Despite demos and heavyweight partnerships, I have two main technical concerns. The first is graphics performance. Simply put, Flash requires graphics hardware support to perform well. Text, lines, shaded areas, polygons etc. all require hardware at HD resolution to run fast enough. Perhaps this is why we are told the first applications will be next year when graphics hardware will be available in top end systems. More crucially, the Flash virtual machine is notoriously slow when compared to C or Java. This means business logic in applications is currently very slow indeed. This is a problem Adobe must address to win in this space.

Is this a nice story or a reality? Its too early to tell.