Adobe(R) FLASH(R) for the Digital Home

Finally after months of trying, the FLASH story on set top boxes is clearing up. For the near future Adobe will be licensing Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 to silicon chip vendors. It will run on high end offerings only. Adobe offers two licensing models: free and paid. The Free license must leave the FLASH engine open (upgradeable) whereas the paid license may enclose the engine in the stack at manufacturing time. This is an interesting conflict. Most middleware and hardware vendors (who write drivers) would not want a third party upgrading the platform I suspect. The testing and support costs could be large. There is no such thing as WHQL for set top boxes so the latest FLASH engine can be a wild card. Secondly its not totally clear what Open means. Perhaps it will mean more than upgrading in the future (delivering adverts on FLASH startup?). This is a new model for set top box vendors and cable operators. However Adobe are most keen for the free model to be taken up and may make the paid license high in order to discourage its uptake.

Which version of FLASH? It will be FLASH lite 3.1 which is a subset of FLASH 8 but with some video support added from FLASH 9/10. The most interesting added video functionality is H.264. The missing functionality from FLASH 8 is:

• Filters (blur, drop shadow, and so forth)
• Blend modes (add, subtract, multiply, and so forth)
• Enhanced strokes (miter, square, and so forth)
• Text as Link
• setTimeout
• _target
• Encoding per pixel alpha with video created with Flash 8 Professional (On2 VP6)
• Bitmap caching
• ActionScript objash Rects or methods
• Flash remoting

The roadmap is currently under NDA but will be available publically on October 4th so watch this space...