In response to yesterday's item about the connection between Weblog's and real-time communications, Marc Canter fairly asks about the thinking behind FlashCom, and its concommittant pricing.
I think the pricing itself is pretty straightforward. It's licensed based on capacity. Workgroup level capcity (e.g. 10 simultaneous connections at any one time, with 1MB of streaming data, enough for 2-3 people doing simple A/V and real-time data) costs 500 dollars. Applications that need to have many hundreds of simultaneous users and more bandwidth start at 5000 dollars, and you can purchase more capacity as your use grows. There are third-party hosting companies such as mediatemple who offer affordable hosting for FlashCom.
In terms of "is it worth it", that's obviously going to vary by the use and need of the customer. I think it's a pretty unique offering, bringing together a wide range of platform technologies that have until now be either available only in their own silos, or just non-existent.
First and foremost, FlashCom tightly integrates with and leverages all of the capabilities of the Flash Player, and really can't be looked at on its own. In addition, it brings together the following:
- audio and video conferencing
- persistent storage of real-time audio and video
- persistent storage of arbitrary UI and shared object data
- the ability to create synchronized online/offline applications
- a generic asynchronous messaging model for internet applications
- a simple programming model for real-time, multi-user shared data and user interfaces
- a flexible streaming audio and video server
- a simple object-rpc mechanism for integrating web services and app logic into communications applications (Flash Remoting)
I'm not aware of any other software, including open source, that puts these things together and makes them available within a ubiquitous, cross-platform client runtime. It would be great to get additional feedback on pricing and licensing, as this is a new offering and early in the adoption cycle.
8:35:18 PM 
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