Adobe Flash Technology Versus Microsoft Silverlight

Flash technology is a free software provided by Adobe which is famous for its software specialized in photo and video editing. Countless websites are using this technology to let their users watch videos online.

According to a report in the New York Times, Adobe is expanding Flash to the television (TV) screen and this piece of news will soon be revealed by Adobe at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.

This extension is beneficial to the users as they can enjoy the same videos not only on their PCs or phones but also on TV screens. As Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen expected, televisions and set top boxes which support the Flash format may probably be launched into the US market at a later time in 2009.

“Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it. This gets us where we want to go,” said Disney CTO Bud Albers on one occasion. Disney is fully supportive on this advancement of Flash technology.

Adobe generates huge profits by selling softwares for Flash. It is estimated that 98% of all computers are installed with Flash and 80% of the videos online are viewed with Flash. Thanks to these impressive figures, Adobe reported a revenue of $3.5 billion, with net income being $871.8 million.

In view of the huge success of Flash, Microsoft introduced a new technology called Silverlight as an alternative for Flash. One of the selling points of Silverlight is that it supports HD 1080p video contents better.

Microsoft commented that HD capability would become the mainstream format for videos in the future. Brad Becker from Microsoft (who is a former executive of Adobe) said he “can’t imagine what could be more important on a television than high video quality.”

Adobe has no competition with anyone in the market for a long period of time. Maybe Microsoft can connect the PCs with the TVs this time.