Industry analyst Ben Bajarin, director of consumer technology for Creative Strategies, said the news is significant because it makes Flash the first enabling technology to allow entertainment providers to stream content directly to televisions. Currently, the way to get this kind of content onto televisions is mainly by hooking up a PC to a TV or set-top box, he said.

Bajarin said Adobe also is approaching its digital home strategy from a different perspective than competitors. Rather than provide a PC with a media-enhanced OS, like Microsoft does with digital home-optimized PCs, Adobe wants to provide a software platform to take content directly from the Internet to TVs.

"It's more from a development platform that Adobe is approaching it," he said. "They want [media companies] to consider how they develop this content and use Flash as the underlying architecture to provide streaming Web-based services to the TV."