Hopefully the post is less provocative than the converging forces (seen are in the referenced links) which are making the provocative assertions possible. Again, this convergence is where I think the surprise factor will appear from - as far as AXC share price valuation is concerned.
It's hard to give the specifics of what I think you are looking for. The past summer and autumn this message board did a collective search of the various storage lines and competitive products and came to the following conclusions. As far as the large scale 19mm is concerned, for speed, features, storage size and recognized industry know how (as measured by Ampex's history of innovation, patent portfolio and royalty streams in this area), no competitor comes close to Ampex in the digital video experience. There was a collection of reference to articles from industry journals which did comparisons and summaries and generally supported these observations. I posted an excellent comparative article from Infostor which is no longer searchable. I will try to locate the link.
The key distinction is the video aspect of the storage question. While there are a number of general storage suppliers, these are really serving the "row-column" market of business computing - Ie. IBM's lunch. The video side not only raises the complexity of the storage but also increases the demands for caching and near real time delivery.
Let me put it a different way. When the general storage providers are ready to tackle the issues of multimedia and video production storage WITH near real time caching and delivery from tape archive (there may not be enough disk platters in the world for this kind of on-line disk storage), they will have to very likely encounter Ampex's patent portfolio when researching their solutions.
I suggest perusing the Ampex's home page and exploring their white papers and those of their partners and associates. Also, MicroNet, with their Mac and post-production affiliations is serving a related market.
The fascinating turn on events here will be when TvontheWeb and AEN-TV will be able to make use of bandwidth and truly deliver interactive TV either on a set-top modified TV or a PC itself. At present, today, this is not quite commercially feasible but with the appropriate equipment (such as DST and MicroNet), will be doable very shortly. This one is for aDave Gardy type person. Here, I know of no other delivery models which can compete.
I don't know enough about BCST's delivery model other than they are more concentrated in the portal delivery than in the content production consequently, their storage requirements tend more to front end communication server storage than video digital storage. In fact, in one of the referenced links, Caban danced around the storage needed issue citing not enough available - use a different delivery - subscription in place of demand.
My background is more in general computing and these are only my opinions. However there are some digital video industry experienced posters on this board who have addressed these questions. I think they could phrase the answers to your questions more succinctly than I can. At one time we thought of setting up a general info link or page for issues such as this.
I see that you have a interest in the general communication carriers. What is your take on their efforts in this important and rapidly changing topical area? Are you picking any show, place or winners?
Ed Perry
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