Flash goes to version 10 as rich media gets richer

The streaming player battle is heating up between Adaobe and Microsoft, with a bunch of smaller also ran’s still in the game jockey for a pice of the booming TVoIP delvery market. Flash 10 extends Adobe’s franchise just as Silverlight 2.0 was announced by Microsoft. This means more online content is coming and it will look and sound better than ever.

Hey duopoly! Where’s our fat pipes?

Adobe on Wednesday will launch Flash Player 10, the latest in its ubiquitous 13-year-old line of multimedia plug-ins. For online video watchers, one big improvement is dynamic streaming, which will automatically shift bitrates as media is being streamed, depending on changing bandwidth. Content owners will need to use an upcoming release of Adobe Media Server to implement this feature.

Other improvements include 3D effects and better support for sound, drawing and text. Adobe has also moved some visual processing tasks to the GPU to improve performance. Support for what’s called RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) will turn the player into a managed peer-to-peer environment and should help enable things like multi-user games and online collaboration. (GigaOm)