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ARM and Adobe announced their collaboration at the Adobe MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco on Monday. According to a joint statement from the companies, the idea is to "optimise and enable" Adobe Flash Player 10 for ARM-powered devices, ranging from mobile phones to set-top boxes, netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs), televisions, personal media players and automotive platforms. That should make it easier for people to play any video they find online on these devices.

Flash Player 10 and AIR are both Adobe technologies for playing rich web content, the difference being that the former is browser-based while the latter can work from other desktop applications.

The optimised Flash Player 10 and AIR will be available in the second half of 2009. It will target not only the ARMv7 architecture used in ARM11 processors and upcoming Cortex-A series processors, but also the ARMv6 architecture, which is currently more widely found in handsets.

According to the statement, the partnership has grown out of Adobe's Open Screen Project, the company's industry-wide initiative to make it easier to browse the web on devices of a variety of types and sizes.

"ARM believes this partnership will develop optimised Adobe Flash and AIR implementations that will run on billions of devices from our partners, such as pocket-sized mobile devices, mobile computing platforms, set-top boxes, digital TVs and automotive infotainment," the chip-design company's vice president of marketing, Ian Drew, said in the statement. "The combination of Adobe Flash and ARM's low-power processor [intellectual property] and Mali [graphics processing units] will ensure a fantastic internet experience for consumers on the world's leading 32-bit architecture."