Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 13, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Adobe announced at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona that the next generation of Adobe Flash Lite will offer extensive video support. Flash Lite is the version of Adobe Flash Player developed specifically for mobile phones. The new Flash Lite 3 is intended to bring videos from the desktop to mobile phones as well as other mobile devices and support network operators, device manufacturers and developers in content development for mobile devices.
“Video support in Flash Lite for mobile phones will revolutionise the use of mobile devices and offer the developers of this content completely new sales opportunities worldwide”, predicts Al Ramadan, Senior Vice President for Mobile and Device Solutions at Adobe Systems. “The new Flash Lite generation makes it possible to enjoy dynamic video content from popular websites such as YouTube or MySpace while on the move. This gives developers a tool for developing completely new applications for different devices and platforms.”
From the company’s perspective, the new Flash Lite version is a significant expansion of its own video solutions such as Adobe Production Studio, Macromedia Flash 8 for video encoding or Flash Media Server for distributing videos. Through the use of Flash technology, the distribution of video formats over the Internet has changed enormously, Adobe states: social-networking websites such as YouTube and MySpace relied on the Flash Player video format FLV to distribute their videos, just as television channels did for the online provision of successful TV series such as “Desperate Housewives”, “Grey´s Anatomy” or “Lost”.
According to the manufacturer, both video streams distributed via Adobe Flash Media Server and all formats compatible with Flash Player are supported directly by version 3. Flash Lite runs on various systems, for example Symbian S60 v2/v3, Qualcomm Brew 2.x/3.x and Microsoft Windows Mobile, as well as on the so-called embedded platforms of various OEM providers. This allows consistent development of content across devices and platforms, faster distribution of rich mobile applications, and simplified publishing, testing and selling of Flash Lite content, Adobe argues. According to company figures, more than 200 million Flash-enabled mobile devices have been shipped to date.
Adobe Flash Lite 3 with integrated video functions is expected to be available in the first half of 2007. Adobe expects mobile phones and mobile devices with support for Flash Lite 3 to be available before the end of this year.
Further links:
- Further information on Flash Lite 3 (Adobe site)
