Today Adobe announced the creation of the Open Screen Project. Adobe, along with a large number of partners including Intel, ARM, Marvell, Nokia, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, NBC Universal, MTV Networks and many others, will be working to create an environment that enables designers and developers to create rich content and applications that can run across devices and desktops, without having to write different implementations for the different mediums.

Adobe’s part in all of this will be in releasing future versions of the Flash Player and Adobe AIR that run consistently across smartphones and other high-end devices, including set-top boxes, the way they run consistently across desktop operating systems today.

The reality is that both the content and application experience from desktop to device today is broken. If you send your friend a great video, chances are that they can’t view it on their phone. If you send that same video to a friend in many parts of the world, chances are that the ONLY way they could view that would be over their phone because they don’t have access to a computer…which means today they can’t view it. While Adobe is uniquely positioned to create runtimes that will deliver on the promise of consistent experiences across devices and desktops, we can’t do this alone. We need hardware partners to help optimize the chips and device manufacturers to help us get the runtimes onto their various systems. And we need to work with content developers to think about the best way to go about creating these experiences.

I think this is an exciting, visionary step for Adobe. As we look to the future, more web content is going to be viewed and used on devices than on desktops, and we need to ensure that it works in a logical, consistent fashion for consumers. This isn’t about “webifying” your client apps. It’s about making the web really work on devices.

As part of this announcement, Adobe has done three things today:

1) removed the licensing restrictions on the SWF specification and the FLV/F4V specifications. The SWF spec has been published since 1998, however you could not build your own Flash Player from it. That restriction has been lifted.

2) removed the licensing fees from future versions of the Flash player for mobile. While this does not affect Flash Lite, our current implmentation of Flash on phones, it will significantly open up the ecosystem around Flash in the future.

3) committed to publishing the porting layer for Flash.

Flash Lite is available on over half a billion phones today. We expect it to be on over a billion phones by 2009. That’s only partial penetration of the device market…and which will dwarf the desktop numbers. This is why it’s so critical that we make the web work consistently on devices as well. We’ve laid out the plans, but these are only the first steps – there’s a lot more to come.

Ryan Stewart has great coverage of this, and if you’re interested, you can hear the news directly from Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch.