Adobe Adds 3D, Other Goodies to Flash Player

Written by Ryan Lawler

Wednesday, October 15. 2008 at 01:40 PM EDT Post a comment

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Just on the heels of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s public release of Silverlight 2, Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced an update of its own media development platform.

Adobe released its new Flash Player 10 to the world today, which the company says will offer native 3D animation support, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration. All of that fits in a 2 MB plug-in.

Flash Player 10 also has tighter integration with Adobe's Creative Suite 4, which will give developers better tools for creating rich Internet applications. That includes the ability to create custom filters and effects with Adobe Pixel Bender.

With the general availability of its new Flash Player 10, Adobe hopes to build on recent gains in online video market share. Adobe already owns 80 percent of the online video market worldwide, senior product marketing manager Tom Barclay says, citing data from comScore Inc. That's up from 66 percent at the beginning of 2008.

Despite wins at some major online events, such as as the Democratic National Convention and NBC Universal's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, Microsoft's share of the video market through Windows Media and Silverlight has actually fallen, from 24 percent at the beginning of the year to 16 percent, according to Barclay.

Adobe also claims to have its Flash Player software installed on 98 percent of all personal computers, and says the most recent version of Flash Player 9 -- which included support for H.264 encoding, among other things -- had reached 90 percent penetration in just nine months. That compares with Silverlight, which Microsoft says is available to one out of every four consumers worldwide.