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SEACHANGE EXTENDS BROADCAST MEDIACLUSTER
PRICE-PERFORMANCE
With New Play-To-Air System
MPEG-2 Video Systems Leader Rolls Out New Member of Broadcast MediaCluster Family for
Moderate Storage and Channel Needs
MAYNARD, Mass., Jan. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- SeaChange International, Inc. (Nasdaq: SEAC) today
introduced the Broadcast MediaCluster 800 Series, the newest member of the SeaChange
Broadcast MediaCluster family of digital video play-to-air systems. With an entry-level price of $112,
500, the 800 Series is the television industry's most aggressively priced fault-tolerant multichannel
MPEG-2 video server system. It delivers a price-performance advantage that is close to twice the
value of competitive systems.
"Since the first customer shipments of our initial broadcast product last year, the Broadcast
MediaCluster has matured into a product line that enables television station operators to achieve
optimum reliability, scalability and video quality for commercial playback and program delivery," said
John Pittas, broadcast products manager, SeaChange International. "The new Broadcast
MediaCluster 800 Series is positioned to deliver fault tolerance to a segment of the market that
could not previously afford this benefit. Competitive systems provide redundancy by duplicating
storage. Our patented RAID2 ('raid squared') architecture eliminates the need for duplicating storage
to deliver fault tolerance. We are aggressively moving this technology down the price curve for the
benefit of small and mid-size broadcasters. This is fault tolerance for the mass market."
Broadcast MediaCluster Family
Currently, two scalable Broadcast MediaCluster models are now
available for order worldwide: the 800 Series and the 1200 Series,
which are third- generation, Windows NT-based MPEG-2 video server
platforms, or 'nodes'. Nodes are the building blocks of the Broadcast
MediaCluster. Interconnected by a high-performance mesh network, nodes
collectively form a single fault-tolerant server designed for program
origination, commercial playback and time/shift delay applications.
SeaChange's MediaCluster technology extends the concept of RAID (Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Disks), from the disks within a node, to nodes within a cluster (RAID2, 'raid squared').
MediaCluster requires only one copy of a video file and dramatically reduces storage requirements
while guaranteeing the availability of video at any output rate. There is no single point of failure and,
in the event of a disk drive or entire node failure, video continues to play. Starting at $112, 500, the
entry-level Broadcast MediaCluster 800 Series configuration provides one input, three outputs and
11 hours of MPEG-2 video storage at 24Mb/sec or 33 hours at 8Mb/sec. SeaChange's
high-performance 4:2:2/4:2:0 MPEG-2 codecs and the integrated Broadcast Operation Service
Station (BOSS) are included. 800 Series configurations can include up to five nodes using 18GB
disk drives providing 15 I/Os and MPEG-2 video storage capacity of 44 hours at 24Mb/sec or 132
hours at 8Mb/sec.
The Broadcast MediaCluster 1200 Series is ideal for television operators with greater requirements.
In a three node cluster configuration, the 1200 Series provides up to 12 I/Os and 96 hours of video
storage at 8Mb/sec, or 32 hours at 24Mb/sec using 18GB disk drives. Scalable to five nodes, with
added storage expansion, the 1200 Series can provide hundreds of hours of storage and 20 I/Os.
All Broadcast MediaCluster configurations can be integrated with leading station automation
packages including those from Drake Automation, Florical, Louth Automation Systems, Odetics,
Omnibus Systems, Pro-Bel, SGT and Sundance Digital.
SeaChange's video server architecture is coupled with world-class digital video I/O subsystems.
SeaChange's integrated MPEG-2 codecs use IBM's second- generation codec ICs, delivering
MPEG-2 Main Level/Main Profile coding up to 15Mb/sec and studio quality Main Level/4:2:2 Profile
coding up to 24Mb/sec. The codecs include serial digital A/V inputs and outputs and other key
features required by the industry.
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