James:
Re: HDTV. It looks like the progressive scanning vs interlaced
scanning camps both decided to do away with any government mandate
and instead proceed to let the marketplace decide. Ampex was an
active member of the Grand Alliance (broadcasters, equipment makers,
etc) in the mid-eighties.
At any rate, the HDTV standard is here. Ampex probably wishes
that the standard was ready 8 years ago when it had the products
ready and it was poised to capitalize on the anticipated shift
from analog broadcast production equipment to digital broadcast
production equipment. The resulting delay ultimately resulted
in Ampex's downsizing and recent reconfiguration as primarily a
mass storage vendor. I am not all that familiar with the scope
of Ampex's patents in digital video except for the more visible
patents related to the D2 19mm format (co-developed with Sony
in 1988) and other post-production equipment. It would be
interesting to see if Ampex can rescuscitate its old business plan,
adjust it accordingly to go with the technology flow, and grab its
share of what is expected to be a $50 billion market.
Tektronix is a company that is trying to do just that. TEK is
a diversified manufacturer of measurement instruments, printers, and
broadcast equipment. It has a unit within the broadcast division
that is trying to capitalize on the same paradigm shift (analog
to digital) that Ampex was ready to exploit in the late eighties.
Ampex was too early. Tektronix is already starting to make some
headway with its lineup of disk recorders, disk servers, and
disk-based non-linear editing solutions. It was recently profiled
in a recent edition of Forbes.
While it's still too early to handicap AXC's chances in this market,
we do know that it has a substantial patent portfolio that it can
use to play the cross-licensing game. For example, Impactdata has
a 19mm digital tape drive that is capable of sustained transfer
rates of 50 MB/second (96 GB cartridge) compared to the 15 MB/second
(up to 165 GB cartridge) of the DST drive. Sony, which only got
into the mass storage market in 1995, has an AIT tape format that
competes directly with Exabyte's 8mm format in the mid-range market.
The interesting thing about the Sony AIT format is the way Sony
has built solid-state memory into each cartridge to handle
index and directory information in order to improve performance.
I am really just guessing here, but those are the type of innovations that Ampex can certainly use to improve the performance and marketability of its products.
I've rambled on too long here so let me end this on a speculative
note, i.e., Ampex may be able to leverage whatever success it has
with keepered media into a cross-licensing agreement with a disk
drive manufacturer that could help it develop a terabyte-sized
disk-based front-end to its DST tape libraries. There are other
terabyte-sized RAID arrays out there, of course, but having its
own solution may come in handy.
Gus
P.S. On December 3, 1996, Informix will be releasing its Universal
Server multimedia database product. Oracle and Sybase are both
working on their own versions of the multimedia database. This
development is expected to increase the need for storage capacity. |
