After Wednseday's announcement that Adobe will cease support for its Flash Mobile Player comes another bombshell: the company will also stop supporting Flash on digital home devices, such as HDTVs.
“Adobe will continue to support existing licensees who are planning on supporting Flash Player for web browsing on digital home devices and are using the Flash Player Porting Kit to do so. However we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path,” said Adobe in a statement to GigaOm.
The key word here is "applications." Adobe won't bother with unifying the fragmented TV app market, instead letting developers create native apps for each platform, preferably (for Adobe) using AIR framework.
This is another blow for Google TV which, frankly, doesn't need any more bad news. The lack of browser-based Flash probably won't be a deal-breaker for Google's Android-based connected TV platform, but Google TV devices have already been selling poorly, and now Google has to figure out how to go on without Flash.