I was thinking of using just a PIC with a decent internal EEPROM myself - it has to store about 2k of data max for now.
Hence I was thinking of that sort of thing.
One master with the data, and 3 slaves connected via serial which pick up the data from the master.

I'll probably be using a mix of 16F877's and 16F627/628's for the slaves, but the master PIC is still open to suggestion )

Leigh