ot: a PR with balls. Mentions VOD. Fails to mention they cost too much to get business. biz.yahoo.com SGI Leads Media Streaming Video Server Market
More Than 1,300 SGI(TM) Broadband Media Server Installations Worldwide
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 12 /PRNewswire/ -- With more than 1,300 broadband media server installations, SGI (NYSE: SGI - news) leads the world in the development, sales and deployment of media streaming technologies for broadband networks. These broadband media servers provide the capacity to deliver more than 150,000 MPEG streams over digital networks using Internet protocol. Whether those networks are public or private, intranets or the Internet, LANs or DSL, connected to PCs or set-top boxes, SGI and its solution partners provide field-proven broadband media streaming solutions and advancements.
According to a Frost & Sullivan Video Server 2000 report, SGI leads the Intranet video server market with a 25.3% market share. Primary media streaming applications that drive demand for servers in this market include corporate communications, distance learning and distance training.
``SGI remains well positioned in the marketplace with a large installed base of video servers and computer hardware that allows them to supply existing customers with technologies to support emerging applications,'' said Rufus Connell, Industry Manager, Frost & Sullivan. ``SGI remains a very competitive force in the video server space as the company focuses efforts in promoting its Media Commerce solutions that leverage its complete server line.''
SGI pioneered media streaming beginning with Interactive Television, the precursor to broadband media. With Time-Warner (soon-to-be AOL-Time Warner) and AT&T, SGI built the hardware and software to power the most ambitious interactive television trial of the mid-1990s in Orlando, Fla. This system, known as the Full Service Network, included set-top boxes developed by SGI, SGI media servers and SGI software for movies on demand, multichannel scheduled playout, interactive shopping and online news -- contributed to the early development of broadband Internet services.
``SGI has been historically known as the leader in digital content creation, producing the high performance workstations preferred by artists and animators worldwide for creating everything from Hollywood blockbusters to the world's most exciting video games,'' said Greg Estes, vice president and general manager, Telecommunications and Media Group, SGI. ``Now, the emergence of broadband networks allows our customers to leverage our scalable content management and content delivery solutions as well as our professional services for their Media Commerce deployments.''
At the heart of SGI's long-standing heritage in media streaming is the SGI(TM) Origin(TM) family of scalable ccNUMA servers -- the development platform for industry-leading broadband media streaming, interactive television, media management, broadcast and digital cinema applications.
Robust Performance for Media Streaming Applications
The SGI media filesystem was designed from the ground up to handle the world's largest media files and media storage demands. A server's filesystem is stressed more by media streaming than almost any other application.
In perhaps the most demanding real-time media filesystem application anywhere, at the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia, 40 satellite and control room broadcast video and audio streams are continually being ingested into an SGI Media Server(TM). This server makes all these video streams available on demand to any and all 300 journalist workstations within a few seconds.
Scalable Server Architecture Provides for Growing Media Streaming Solutions
The tremendous success of the award-winning SGI Origin is due to SGI's ccNUMA architecture, which allows for seamless scalability from 2 to 512 processors in a single shared-memory system. This architecture is based on a series of SGI-designed crossbar switches, which scale the bandwidth and I/O of the system as the system configuration scales, delivering true application scalability. As media streaming needs grow and the demands for network access speeds, storage and number of simultaneous streams increase, customers can easily add streaming capability, network cards, storage I/O and even CPUs to their original SGI Origin series systems. SGI also provides support for terabytes of storage, a variety of high-performance network access cards, JBOD and RAID options with SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces and a journaled filesystem for fast recovery of very large media files. SGI also offers a clustered filesystem, instrumental in a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment, allowing customers to move vast amounts of data between distribution servers at a very rapid rate.
Development Platform of Choice
SGI is the development platform for Kasenna(TM) MediaBase, the predominant MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 media streaming solution available today for streaming broadband content to PC clients. Not only is this application field-proven on SGI, new versions of MediaBase are shipped first on SGI servers.
Wide Range of Solutions
SGI platforms support the widest range of media management and serving solutions available, including SGI Media Server(TM) for production and broadcast, Panasonic DNA(TM), SGI Media Server for broadband, Kasenna MediaBase and burst.com Burstware© for media serving; and SGI StudioCentral(TM), Keops(TM) MediaWorks and Informix© Media360(TM) for media management. SGI was first to deliver a broadband media server that supports multiple industry-leading streaming formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, RealVideo©, RealAudio©, MP3 and QuickTime(TM).
Worldwide Digital Media Expertise
With digital media expertise centers in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, the Netherlands and Tokyo and installations from Singapore to Stockholm, SGI Professional Services is more experienced at large-scale media streaming deployments than any other computer manufacturer.
Customer installations of SGI Media Commerce(TM) broadband media streaming solutions include world leaders in telecommunications, education, Fortune 500 companies, Sciences and entertainment such as:
MCI/Worldcom France Telecom NOB (Netherlands) British Telecom Stanford University Harvard University California State Polytechnic University of Pomona Lucent Bell Labs Innovation Center Pepsi Center Mayo Clinic CNN RAI NASA
About SGI
SGI provides a broad range of broadband Internet, high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. SGI broadband and Internet solutions enable customers to expand their business in Media Commerce -- transacting content over networks. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the company is located on the Web at www.sgi.com.
NOTE: Silicon Graphics is a registered trademark, and SGI, Origin, SGI Media Commerce, Media Commerce, SGI Media Server, StudioCentral and the SGI logo are trademarks, of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Burstware is a registered trademark of burst.com. Kasenna is a trademark of Kasenna, Inc. Informix is a registered trademark and Media360 is a trademark of Informix Corporation. RealVideo and RealAudio are registered trademarks of RealNetworks, Inc. QuickTime is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: SGI |