Our take...
This is a natural evolution of Adobe's flash platform, which has developed from a presentation layer for websites into the market leader video distribution over the web. Flash is currently used by YouTube, Hulu, MLB.com and the BBC's iPlayer are among others and building Flash into consumer electronics devices should facilitate the transfer of web services into the living room.

As online video moves further into the home through the growing number of directly connected devices, extending Flash to a wider range of hardware is an obvious move for Adobe. Particularly as Microsoft continues to aggressively develop its rival Silverlight platform and associated PlayReady DRM ecosystem on the PC with mobile and TV components in the pipeline. Adobe already offers a version of Flash for mobile phones.

The announced model of a paid version and later a free one is slightly unusual for Adobe which has historically monetised the platform ensuring as wide a distribution of the player software as possible and then selling authoring and distribution tools. This strategy has allowed Adobe to reach Flash penetration of over 98 per cent of PCs and has allowed the company achieve widespread adoption of new versions relatively quickly. However, uptake on consumer electronics devices will be slower, because it is based on hardware adoption. The average life span of a TV is six years as a result penetration of the living room cannot match the rate of uptake on PC.