Macromedia is now talking publicly about FlashCast. Siting on top of the mobile phone’s resident Flash Lite player, FlashCast is a framework that enables channels of content to be downloaded and presented on a mobile phone. After a one-off download of the channel structure, small packets of content are updated when the handset is within service. There channels, currently text and graphics, are then presented to the user to be browsed as and when required, regardless of if the handset had reception.
ZDNet has an short video interview with the CEO of Macromedia that also give an idea of how a channel might look. He also reveals that DoCoMo has shipped two to three million handsets with Flash on board.
There is no official information available from Macromedia currently, but Mike Krisher has written a background to FlashCast and his piece carries out some comparison with Qualcomm’s BREW – a similar concept.
Given platforms live or die by the amount of content on them, it would seem likely that the large amount of content that is already authored in Flash make it more likely that FlashCast would succeed over BREW.