Swimming up stream: This part of the industry took a hit along with the stock market and dot.coms, and these makers of streaming products are looking at corporations to re-gain acceptance

Post, March, 2002 by Christine Bunish

"When you download our player/software it turns your computer into a server" explains Collazo. "You serve directly from server to server. The more people who use NetDVD, the more servers we have on our network. The network scales depending on popularity. Take for instance a live Pay Per View Webcast event for over a million people. The question is, what if each person was a mirrored server? In theory, you'd have a flawless PPV event"

NetDVD is built around a proprietary process that can be viewed using any player including Apple QuickTime, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer. The application also offers flexible and scalable video delivery streams to Pocket PCs, PDAs and Macintosh and Linux systems.

Collazo reports that NetDVD is "the only methodology processing 30 fps for both VOD and live streams. People use the term 'live' too loosely on the Internet," he says. "They claim to be streaming live on the Internet when, in reality, they are delivering VOD. Most streaming companies deliver blurry, mediocre and less-than-desirable video quality People are accustomed to the slide-show look of video streaming until they see the NetDVD network delivery, and then they say, 'Wow!'"

NetDVD's first target users will be "consumers who desire to control and share multimedia content over any network including the Internet" Says Roger Paglia, CEO of Nexcode's parent company Media & Entertainment.com, Inc., "Because the NetDVD application is capable of delivering packets via a LAN/WAN and various Intranet infrastructures, the entertainment and broadcasting industries and the corporate market also stand to be early adopters."

Nexcode, which will not be at NAB this year, will generate revenues for itself from the sale of modules which can be integrated with NetDVD to create "a massive solution," says Nexcode CEO Nana Yalley. "People can purchase plug-ins such as corporate teleconferencing modules or a PPV module for tracking subscribers. For review and approval of edits and dailies the Avid and Media 100 editing workstations' plug-ins are in development for release in the third quarter of 2002,"

RELATED ARTICLE: SGI's Origin 300 takes on VOD

MOUNTAINVIEW, CA -- At NAB 2002, SGI (www.sgi.com) plans to announce new video on demand storage for its Origin 300 server, which is employed by satellite companies and telcos worldwide. Greater density and better performance is expected to drive down the cost per stream, attracting more VOD subscribers and making it more affordable to deploy.

The Origin 300, the latest in SGI's scalable family of servers, was launched last October. "We sold hundreds of Origin 200s ,which are great machines, very reliable," notes Marc Nolte, one of SGI's global market development managers for media commerce solutions. "Customers just told us to make the 200 smaller, faster and cheaper. Origin 300 addresses all of those requests."

Thanks to smaller, more powerful discs available from the OEM market, Origin 300's space-saving configuration is five times as dense as the 200 was one year ago for the equivalent -- in excess of 250 -- number of video streams. Origin 300 is also 2.5 times more cost effective than the 200, Nolte reports.