Adobe and Disney Make Big Announcement at NAB Conference

Well, to those of you already deep in the Flash community and/or understand how IPTV has been rolling out on both the PC screen and the TV screen, this will come as old news.

For those of you who have viewed Flash as kind of a superficial means to a more creative web site, this will expose the tool and the technology for what it truly is - a deeper, more interactive portal to a further reaching media experience. Beyond the small screen, beyond crappy intros.

Marketers who understand that you have to entertain, educate and offer it all in a very convenient, intuitive and interactive package will read this piece and rejoice. Marketers who are still stuck in a "push, push, push" mentality and still don't see the value of a highly interactive, audience driven 21st Century experience, will read this, scratch their head and continue wasting their budgets on antiquated techniques.

Flash developers, you might want to get ready, once these technologies start trickling out into the market, you will be busy, very busy. It will not stop with mobile and television. Think any connected screen anywhere. That is the missing detail from this story.

Click on the excerpt below to visit the entire story on the New York Times web site.

Pulled from the New York Times...

Flash was once known primarily as the technology behind those niggling Web ads in the 1990s that gyrated and flickered on the screen. Today, it is a ubiquitous but behind-the-scenes Web format used to display Facebook applications, interactive ads and, most notably, the video on sites like YouTube and Hulu.com.

Now Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, wants to extend Flash’s reach even further. On Monday, Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.

For consumers, what sounds like a bit of inconsequential Internet plumbing actually means that a long overhyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.

For Hollywood studios and other content creators, a single format for Web video is even more enticing. It means they can create their entertainment once in Flash — as the animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir,” from Sony Pictures Classics, was made — and distribute it cheaply throughout the expanding ecosystem of digital devices.

“Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it,” said Bud Albers, the chief technology officer of the Disney Interactive Media Group, who will join Adobe executives at the convention to voice Disney’s support for the Flash format. “This gets us where we want to go.”