There are so many big announcements these days with respect to how technology is quickly changing the production, distribution and consumption of entertainment, informational and educational content that is difficult to pick which ones are the true game-changers. The announcement from Adobe about its latest Flash player, which integrates MPEG-4 decoding, may be the biggest announcement so far this year regarding video. 

Designed to work on the desktop as well as set-top or phone, this could be a de-facto standard, the way Flash has become the dominate method of viewing videos on the Internet. The Adobe Press release suggests that full-screen HD resolution content will be possible in the Flash environment. It sounds like it also has the potential to simplify the producer’s workflow, as they can output their video directly to an MPEG-4 file and not have to transcode to Flash. This could have a huge long-term impact on the Windows Media approach to video.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/