Adobe licenses Flash Lite to Microsoft for mobile phones

What wasn't good enough for Steve Jobs seems just fine for Microsoft, as it takes this opportunity to embed a version of Adobe's streaming video technology into its future mobile Web browsers, right alongside Adobe's rival Silverlight.

More and more, Microsoft is making a very visible effort to play nice, or at least nicer, by making room for its rivals alongside its own technology. This morning, it let Adobe hail the latest move rather than horde the megaphone, announcing that Adobe is licensing its Flash Lite mobile graphics platform to Microsoft for use, apparently, in a future mobile Web browser.

With a desktop Web browser, a user typically downloads a platform extension just after she encounters the first Web page that requires it. For example, many of Microsoft's own Web pages run Silverlight, and the upcoming NBC Olympics Web site will use it as well; new visitors there will probably take a few minutes to download and install Silverlight.

On a mobile platform, however, where seating is somewhat more limited and often allocated in advance by carriers, users aren't as free to just download Silverlight or Flash Lite the moment they realize they need it.

So Microsoft's move to attain a license for Flash Lite is more significant, especially to demonstrate it intends to deploy Silverlight for mobile platforms on competitive terms rather than the exclusionary terms folks have come to associate with Microsoft over the years.

The move comes a few weeks after Nokia demonstrated a port of Silverlight for Symbian S60 devices, while at the same time, Apple CEO Steve Jobs publically dissed Flash as being, in his view, too slow.

Some of the most important elements that Flash Lite brings to a mobile platform are the video codecs commonly used in streaming. Silverlight is based not only around Windows Media, but also around Microsoft's VC-1 codec, which was to have been prominent in HD DVD and may yet find a home in a future incarnation of Blu-ray, assuming everyone plays nice in that arena as well.

But Flash Lite brings the On2 VP6 codec supported by version 8 of the near-ubiquitous Flash platform over the Web, as well as the Sorenson version of the H.264 MPEG-4 codec for version 7. While it's not incompatible with Apple's version, developed for QuickTime in 2005, it isn't exactly Apple's version.

Besides the cute name, certain features from Flash 8 had to be subtracted in order to create a smaller, embeddable profile for Flash Lite. Among them, graphical objects aren't rendered exactly the same way, as blend modes for overlapping objects and enhanced brushstrokes are not supported. Also, CSS stylesheets used for explaining formats in Flash pages are not supported in Flash Lite, nor are embedded external bitmap images.