What would Divicom say about the following quote?
"The broadcast industry is undergoing a video-networking revolution
similar to the data-networking revolution that other industries entered
10 years ago," said James Olson, president of Skystream Corp. (Mountain
View, Calif.). "But interoperable, standard, flexible MPEG video
networking solutions do not yet exist.Divi should be working on this.
Rest of text below. Dated Nov. 11.
New Net seen pulling together voice, data, video
By George Leopold
Arlington, Va. - The architects of the follow-on to the Internet said
last week that they hope to dismantle the barriers among voice, data and
video networks and to merge those applications into a souped-up version
of today's "commodity" public network.
The Next Generation Networks conference here focused on how emerging
network technologies are being deployed and how they are being paired
with new applications, ranging from videoconferencing to IP
multicasting. Driving much of the technology and standards debate is the
emergence of so-called quality-of-service issues as network congestion
slows response times.
"The Internet is growing up," said Fred Baker, chairman of the Internet
Engineering Task Force and senior software engineer for Cisco Systems
Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "Expect to see the vendors and backbone
providers growing up as well."
The maturation process is taking several forms. Government, industry and
university efforts are now under way to build prototypes of a future
Internet that is envisioned as offering 1,000 times the speed
performance of the current Internet. There are also efforts to improve
the performance of key components, such as servers, routers and
backbones, while discovering new applications that will hasten the
convergence of today's data, voice and video networks.
Two efforts to upgrade the Internet-the government-sponsored
next-generation Internet initiative and the university-led Internet
2-provided a framework at the conference for pushing networking
technology forward while addressing performance shortfalls. Both efforts
focus on prototype technology development that will eventually be
disseminated to industry, developers here said.
The initiatives will also support development of next-generation video
and voice applications, such as interactive and distance learning and
digital libraries, conference participants said.
Despite efforts to drive networking technologies forward, some
underlying technologies are expected to persist. For example, according
to Cisco's Baker, the ubiquitous Internet Protocol won't be replaced
anytime soon by asynchronous transfer mode or similar technologies.
At the same time, emerging compression technologies, such as MPEG, are
expected to play a critical role in such video-networking applications
as broadband routing.
Revolution brewing
"The broadcast industry is undergoing a video-networking revolution
similar to the data-networking revolution that other industries entered
10 years ago," said James Olson, president of Skystream Corp. (Mountain
View, Calif.). "But interoperable, standard, flexible MPEG video
networking solutions do not yet exist.
"This is creating a sizable opportunity for new networking innovations,
equipment types and even new companies."
Olson predicted that next-generation multimedia networks will be a mix
of IP, ATM and MPEG technologies. "The relevant questions [aren't] which
one will prevail," he said, "but how they should best be combined."
Similarly, next-generation server networks are being tailored to handle
and store vast amounts of data and video in the multi-terabyte range,
industry experts said. Relying heavily on Fibre Channel and other
physical network technology, developers are striving to ease the
transition to streaming video over the Internet-or what Marc Friedmann,
president of Prisa Networks (San Diego), called "networked video."
The migration path will be from legacy video production to
"network-based computer-video creation and production" over the
Internet, Friedmann said.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc. |
