"On the one hand, we see a lot of Flash growth, and working directly with Adobe was a given," said Paul Bosco, vice president of video and broadband initiatives at Cisco. "On the other, standards are very important to our developers, so we are working with Adobe at moving beyond native Flash file formats to advanced standards like H.264."

Adobe has heavily promoted Flash video development within Adobe Labs since acquiring Macromedia Inc., originators of Flash, for $3.4 billion in April of 2005. In addition to standalone players such as Moviestar, Adobe is promoting Flash heavily in its Creative Suite 3 development software. Nevertheless, the company must challenge a strong presence in the form of players from Real Networks Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Bosco emphasized that Cisco's CDS must work with all proprietary video file formats, as well as with emerging open standards, though Adobe's pledge to move further along the path begun in Moviestar helped propel the Adobe-Cisco deal.

While the pact could bring Flash content to home DTV through Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes owned by Cisco, both Bosco and Adobe vice president of dynamic media Jim Guerard emphasized that near-term interest is heavily skewed toward desktop-computing environments, with TV environments still a few years off.

Nevertheless, putting CDS for cable in place now could help drive the unification of IPTV and streaming-media content, Bosco said. The biggest demand from customers, he said, is that stream and real-time video content have a similar look and feel, as well as similar Quality of Service constraints, whether accessed from a computer, TV or wireless device. Eventually, those services would be accessed from a framework that would look the same in any hardware platform, Bosco said.