Adobe announces Flash Player 10.1, AIR 2.0 beta

At Adobe MAX 2009, held in Los Angeles back in October, Adobe's CTO announced the features for an upcoming point upgrade to Flash Player 10.

"We've begun working with 19 of the 20 top handset manufacturers, "said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, "to bring Flash Player 10.1 support to these mobile platforms."

Lynch meant that all the top handset manufacturers (except Apple, of course, with its non-Flash iPhone) will be able to run full Flash content on their smartphones.

"This provides a consistent runtime across desktops and mobile devices," said Lynch, "and is supported by close to 50 participants in the Open Screen Project, including support Google Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile."

Within the Open Screen Media Framework (OSMF), Flash Player 10.1 is the first fully-compliant player, and is available as of today as a beta on Adobe Labs.

Adobe is looking to introduce HTTP streaming, coupled with content protection from its forthcoming Flash Access 2.0.


Jen Taylor, who spoke to Bit O' Tech just prior to the IBC show in September, also spoke at MAX about the impending solution.

"To date, you can choose RTMP streaming or progressive download," said Taylor, Adobe's Director of Flash Content Creation and Distribution. "We're also rolling out HTTP streaming, starting in 2010, due to feedback from customers who wanted to leverage their existing HTTP infrastructure."

Taylor said it made sense for customers to consider the Open Screen implementations.

"It's more complicated than it looks to overlay text, images or even Flash (SWF) files over Flash video," said Taylor. "In the end, everyone was re-inventing the wheel, and we saw this as an opportunity to solve an issue for everyone."

The framework allows for parallel playback of content (two videos side by side), text overlays, image overlays and other options.

"We found that many also were spending too much time on analytics," said Taylor, shortly after Adobe's acquisition of Omniture was announced. "What they really wanted to do, instead, was to spend the time focusing on customer experience."

"We worked with the community to identify partners to integrate in to the OSMF," said Taylor. "One of those was Omniture, but there are 40 others we are working to integrate."

Adobe also announced the release of Adobe AIR 2.0 beta, which uses the Flash Player engine to drive video content for offline or desktop delivery.