Adobe has just announced the Open Screen Project, a broad-based initiative to push Flash’s reach across all digital platforms, including mobile and television. Supporters include BBC, Cisco, Motorola, MTV, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and a host of other consumer technology, content, and mobile companies.

When Living Networks was launched in 2002, I wrote about how Macromedia (which has since been acquired by Adobe) used an open strategy to make Flash a standard in rich media on the web:

Whenever you go to a website and are presented with a snazzy animated introduction, you are seeing Macromedia Flash at work. The free Flash Player software that enables people to view these animations is now running on around 97% of PCs that are connected to the Internet. At the outset, Macromedia had a clear-cut challenge. Web surfers would only download Flash Player if there were interesting websites using Flash, while website designers would only use Flash if a sufficient proportion of their target audience had installed the software. Macromedia makes its money by selling the software for developers to create Flash files, but to make it a viable market it had to give away the Flash Player software.

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