SGI spin-off targets video-via-Internet
By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
Mar 5, 2001 (12:24 PM)
URL: eetimes.com
SAN MATEO, Calif. — With an eye to getting in on the ground floor of the fledgling technology that delivers video over the Internet, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) spin-off Kasenna Inc. will launch an integrated software platform today (March 5) for streaming video over distributed Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Called Kasenna MediaBase Network Edition, the platform provides software ranging from content management and distribution to edge caching and streaming to enable IP video delivery over different types of networks.
If vendors like Akamai and Digital Island are the market's first movers to deliver video content over the Internet, Kasenna looks to provide "a preintegrated end-to-end solution to the second movers — companies with valuable content and those who own bandwidth," said chief technology officer Satish Menon. Kasenna (Mountain View, Calif.) hopes to zero in on programming companies such as CNN and service providers such as telcos, cable operators and ISPs, who wish to build a comprehensive, distributed IP network over which rich, streaming media can be securely delivered.
The streaming media market remains fragmented, Menon said, with no critical mass in audience. "An awful lot of companies today are still focused mainly on streaming and caching technologies," he said. "And they offer only a point solution." But successful streaming media deployments would require a more complex, multiple-component integration in the end-to-end system, he argued. "It's time to move on to a platform approach."
With the company's new MediaBase Network Edition software, "We'd allow service providers to take content from any source or in any format, distribute it over any network, and deliver it to any device," Menon said.
Asked about the size of the video content-delivery market over the Internet, Walter Miao, vice president at Probe Research (Cedar Knolls, N.J.), bluntly said, "It's not very big yet, because no one can do it very well."
But compared with a number of small players crowding the so-called IP-based content-delivery network market today, Kasenna is unusual and might have an edge, said Miao, "Because it does not play favorites" when it comes to streaming technologies. "They've developed a network-management technology that allows them to take content in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media, RealNetworks' RealVideo, Apple Computer's QuickTime or MPEG-4, however it is encoded." The Kasenna platform also comes with some unique hooks that may smooth out the delivery of video and may make Hollywood rights holders feel more secure, said Miao.
Kasenna's metadata-based distribution platform, for example, allows "prefix caching." By using "video leaders" included with metadata describing video assets, Kasenna's customers, for example, can start delivering video to viewers immediately without waiting for central servers to deliver video over the congested public Internet. The technique also saves them from intensive capital investment in duplicating and storing extensive video files at both core and edge servers.
Meanwhile, Kasenna's metadata-based content management software can track, report and bill and target advertising by describing each video object's physical characteristics, digital rights and location.
Kasenna's MediaBase Network Edition is available for the SGI Irix this month, with versions for Linux in the second quarter and Sun Solaris in the third quarter.
Kasenna today is doing long-term evaluation and pilot programs with a few early customers. This includes collaborations with content providers such as CNN, and a network operator in Japan who plans to deliver streaming media to large-scale media access systems, Menon said.
"The scalability of our platform — built around a well-defined work flow — was particularly attractive to this Japanese network operator," he added, "because they are also hoping to deliver their content over the wireless network, in the future, to cell phone users."
With no industry standards to define interfaces between key components of the streaming media infrastructure, it's almost impossible for a network operator to piece together different software from different vendors on its own. At Kasenna, Menon said, "We are offering a pre-integrated solution and publishing our own platform APIs" encompassing content management, content distribution to edge caching and streaming.
The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA), of which Kasenna is a founding member, was formed late last year to push MPEG-4-based open standards for streaming media over the Web. Just as Digital Audio Visual Council (Davic) was instrumental in the mid '90s in defining a number of critical interfaces enabling MPEG-2-based digital video distribution over cable, satellite and terrestrial broadcast, some in the industry hope that ISMA will play a similarly important role in the streaming media world. |
