Sun aims workstations at the digital-TV world
By Alexander Wolfe and George Leopold
PALO ALTO, Calif. - A new frontier for workstation designers is opening
up, as the engineering pacesetters of the field look to Hollywood as an
emerging market with limitless potential. High-end workstations fitted with
graphics accelerators are being snapped up by creators of digital content for
television and for Hollywood.
Heating up activity is the impending shift from analog TV to high-definition
television (HDTV) and to the standard-resolution digital format known as
SDTV. (Domestic digital broadcasts are scheduled to begin in November.)
All workstations, regardless of processor or operating system, are in the
picture. Indeed, Silicon Graphics and Intergraph Corp. have long targeted
this market. (IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq have also made some
forays - though not as broad - into the broadcast and animation worlds.)
Now, they're being joined by a new and potent competitor in the form of
Sun Microsystems Inc.
"This is a totally new market for Sun," said Sam Turcotte, marketing
manager for entertainment technology at Sun. The company launched its
thrust at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in April in Las
Vegas and reintensified its efforts last month at Siggraph '98 in Orlando, Fla.
At Siggraph, Sun corralled several technology partners with expertise in
HDTV and MPEG-2 to put on an impressive display of workstation-based
solutions.
Digital Video Systems GmbH (Hannover, Germany), for example, showed
a complete HDTV post-production system comprising its own ProntoVision
digital-disk recorder and Sun's Enterprise 450 server. The recorder
streamed 120 Mbytes/second of uncompressed HDTV video to a RAID
disk array.
Also on display were digital-editing offerings from Media-Ware Solutions
(Canberra, Australia). Running on Sun workstations, the editors allow
MPEG-2 video streams to be edited and spliced together in real-time.
A key selling point, said David Keightley, managing director of MediaWare,
is an on-screen software interface that mimics the front panel of standard
editing hardware used in TV and post-production studios.
Unlike computer users, TV engineers don't like to use a mouse, Keightley
noted. That's just one of the cultural differences coming to light as the more
buttoned-down workstation crowd begins to interface with pony-tailed
Hollywood types. "The two worlds are beginning to come closer together,"
said Keightley.
Along with its workstation and server technologies, Sun wants to thrust Java
into the entertainment world. Paving this path are Sun's Java 3-D and Java
Media Interfaces, which the company hopes developers will use to create
animation- and editing-related apps.
The timing for Sun's media foray looks good. The digital-content-creation
market is in the midst of a boom as movies add ambitious,
computer-created special effects and as cable- and broadcast-TV
operations begin the long conversion cycle from analog to digital production
equipment. Indeed, according to a recent inside industry estimate, the total
entertainment market in 1998 could be worth as much as $2.46 billion.
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