What Should I Choose? Adobe Flash Or Microsoft Silverlight?

Flash technology is a free software provided by Adobe which is famous for its software specialized in photo and video editing. Countless websites are using this technology to let their users watch videos online.

According to a report in the New York Times, Adobe is expanding Flash to the television (TV) screen and this piece of news will soon be revealed by Adobe at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas.

Users will no longer be restricted to viewing videos on the PC and phones. It will be possible to watch the same videos on TV screens once flash technology is TV-compatible. Later in 2009, you should be able to find TVs and set top boxes which support the Flash format on shelf racks in the US, as Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen predicted.

Bud Albers, the CTO of Disney, said that his company supports the idea of extending Flash to televisions. He commented that “Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it. This gets us where we want to go.”

Adobe generates huge profits by selling softwares for Flash. It is estimated that 98% of all computers are installed with Flash and 80% of the videos online are viewed with Flash. Thanks to these impressive figures, Adobe reported a revenue of $3.5 billion, with net income being $871.8 million.

Microsoft, who is determined to fight for its share in this particular market, launches Silverlight. Microsoft argued that Silverlight should be a better choice compared to Flash when it comes to HD 1080p video contents.

Brad Becker from Microsoft, who is also a former Adobe executive emphasized the importance of HD capability. Every standard video to be played on TV would call for that in its form format. “I can’t imagine what could be more important on a television than high video quality.”

Adobe has no competition with anyone in the market for a long period of time. Maybe Microsoft can connect the PCs with the TVs this time.