Adobe FlashCast comes to America making content easy for mobile subscribers

Adobe and Verizon made the joint announcement today that Verizon will be bringing the FlashCast service to their mobile subscribers. FlashCast is Adobe's delivery mechanism for mobile phones. Users can subscribe to FlashCast "channels" which contain content like news, music and sports. The model is a push down service so that Flash enabled mobile devices can sync the content when the phone has service and then make it available later regardless of coverage. It has been quite popular in Asia, and now that Verizon has signed up, we'll have it here in the USA.

FlashLite, the mobile version of Flash, has continued to build momentum. FlashLite 3 was recently announced as including the ability to deliver video content to devices. Hopefully that will open up the rich web video ecosystem to mobile phones and help jumpstart the mobile video world.

With FlashCast support, both customers and users will find the mobile experience much smoother. Developers and designers now have an easy way to deliver Flash content to devices. Users can now easily pull that content into their phone. FlashCast abstracts some of the more difficult parts of deploying and downloading content which has hindered growth of the market in the past. Now, that should change, and I think it should have a positive effect on the small but expanding mobile market in North America. Biskero.org has some information about how well FlashCast has done in Asia.

More info over on Bill Perry's site as well.