Intel, Adobe want to see Flash on TV screens

Intel has ported Adobe Systems' Flash software technology to work with its processors used in consumer electronics such as set-top boxes and high-definition TVs, Intel said Monday.

The Flash support will help bring a larger variety of rich Internet content to consumer electronics devices, which should provide a better entertainment experience to viewers, said Mary Ragland, an Intel spokeswoman.

Intel plans to ship the processors with Adobe Flash Lite support by the middle of the year, Ragland said. Content providers will be able to add entertainment services that support Adobe Flash on devices running Intel's chips.

The Internet's role in the delivery of entertainment content has become evident in a number of recent announcements and will be a prominent theme at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opens Thursday and runs through Sunday.

LG announced last week that it will release Blu-ray players that can stream movies from the online movie rental service CinemaNow and pull content from YouTube. The company then announced Monday in the run up to CES that it will begin selling HDTVs with Ethernet connections to allow Netflix members to stream movies from the Internet. Samsung Monday announced HDTVs that run widgets, or mini-applications that complement TV viewing with information from the Internet. The TVs and Blu-ray players will be shown at CES.

Intel has developed processors for the consumer electronics market, which requires more computing and graphics power to handle high-resolution images.The Intel Media Processor CE3100 system-on-a-chip platform enables high-resolution imaging and broadcast TV for consumer electronics devices.

Intel and Adobe are also working together on processors for Adobe AIR, a runtime that lets software developers build rich Internet applications. Support for AIR on the processors will be announced by the end of the year, Ragland said.

Intel is also working with Yahoo to develop Widget Channel, a hardware and software platform designed to meld television and the Internet. The companies offered developers a software toolkit to create widgets.

IDG News Service

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