Hollywood says NO to Steve Jobs

The Apple vs Adobe fight drags on with several large media companies going Adobe's way by not relenting to Apple's directives on changing their Flash based media content to the ones supported by Apple's iPhone and iPad.

According to a #-Link-Snipped-# by New York Times, “several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won't retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

The resistance to the change buoys on the hope that the recently announced tablet pcs by Dell and HP (and a few more) will include support for Flash, thus requiring no extra work for these media companies towards re-encoding as they can run their media on the currently popular Flash technology.

Apple's cause will be further weakened as Google TV plans to distribute media content using Flash technology.

After a string of bad experience with Adobe's product in their devices, Apple decided to cut off its customers from Flash entirely for both interactive and video content and it pushed for the development of HTML5 and H.264 formats instead. According to Apple, Flash is an old technology and causes faster depletion of battery life along with a slew of other issues that reportedly spoils the iPhone/iPad experience.

Though Apple has been slow in getting most media companies into their fold in the past too, time has shown that they had to return back on their side after a certain period of time. Things were sour with  the media companies when Apple decided to sell songs on their iTunes at a flat rate across the board but they had to relent in the end when their own rival marketing model fell flat.

This time too Apple is facing the difficulty of getting the media companies to agree upon its set of directives but it doesn't seem long before they actually end up agreeing. Already, high profile companies like Virgin America, Scribd, Disney, Fox News, CNN among others have started delivering media content according to the formats supported by Apple's products. These companies are of the view that Apple's customers represent a large portion of the affluent demographic of users and hence they are lining up to cash in alongside Apple's continued success with its products.

It would be interesting to see what Adobe executive have to say regarding the matter as this is the first time in several weeks that something good has come their way and not Steve Jobs!

Rishabh Ghosh is a tech enthusiast and is a regular contributor at the CrazyEngineers forums.