Scott,
Some good questions, I will attempt to address them. The company is offering to lease a complete, bundled solution that encompasses hardware, software, network gear, bandwidth, operations, maintenance and user support - all for a fixed monthly fee. Sort of like buying a cell phone, if you will.
I think in many cases, the intended use will be within an organization. However, Sean Coughlin of Cinetech has already said that he wants to use this technology to communicate with his customers (film production companies like MGM, Warner Bros, Pixar, Sony) so that they can meet and review a films progress without having to be in the same place.
Also, if a network is installed in a single location, no telecom bandwidth is required. The network will run on an ATM switch. I think that in most cases though, at least some long-distance or even short-haul telecom links will be used.
The web site has recently been overhauled, I don't know when you visited it last, but I encourage you to look at the whole thing. The company is working on the marketing stuff and I believe that they are developing ROI materials as well. The uniqueness of the solution is hard to fully appreciate without actually seeing the technology. I have seen it demo'ed twice. The quality in terms of frame rate (no jerky movements, lip movements and audio are synchronized), color and usability are astonishing. Also, the company claims that the network can scale to include many thousands of endpoints with no degradation in performance. This is not multicasting, this is interactive and real-time. The largest number of endpoints I have seen any other solution claim is about 32 (for conferencing).
I don't believe that the revenue opportunity is detailed on the web site. It's hard to say what that will be until they actually start signing customers. However, the early adopters with whom they are working are certainly capable of generating very large orders. Remains to be seen if that will happen though, but I think it bears watching. Hope that helps...
p.s. TeraMedia will be interoperable with all existing standards. So you will be able to video-conference with a non-TeraMedia platform (H.323) but the quality will be limited to the lowest common denominator.
p.p.s. You asked about whether this solution can run on existing PC's. The answer is no. The level of capabilities that they are interested in delivering require a processor that can execute a gigaflop. The AltiVec is such a processor. It is a supercomputer on a chip, that is NOT just Apple marketing hype. In order to compress and decompress multiple data streams in real-time on one processor, it has to be extremely fast. Don't be fooled by MHz comparisons. The AltiVec executes up to 20 instructions per clock-cycle. It is blazingly fast, consumes 4 watts of power and was designed for precisely this type of application. The next generations will be faster and use even less power. |
