I met with Tucker Snedeker, VP of Mobile Business Development of Bluestreak, who demonstrated Bluestreak’s technology, which runs even of 50 MIPS processors with less than a megabyte of memory. It competes with Adobe/Macromedia’s FlashLite player, and runs SWF files natively. Bluestreak’s primary successes in the past three and a half years have been with cable TV set top box deployments, and they are now pushing into mobile.

Bluestreak is not a FlashLite player, but can read and run Flash files. It’s a multimedia engine that “just happens to support the Flash format.” It is also an ECMA script engine. FlashLite 1.1 is not supported, but instead Flash as web developers know it, a more robust, capable scripting engine with a Flash 7 development profile. ActionScript is a mirror image of ECMA script.

Bluestreak leverages the Flash authoring environment with a set of tools that plug in and enhance the authoring environment especially for mobile deployment. Bluestreak does not support every feature, such as Flash Video—FLV. Instead, 3GPP, Windows Media, and other standards are supported by Bluestreak.

Bluestreak is deployed on Orange for their Orange World TV, a 52-channel live streaming TV service, launched in February 2006. Also, Bluestreak supports Orange’s League One soccer product. Tucker demonstrated the Orange World product, and it was fast, smooth, and played video like a champ. He even showed me a rich SMS authoring application, proving their tight integration with native phone functions.

The key advantage of Bluestreak is terrific performance even on very low end hardware, with a truly attractive price point.