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To: Don Hand who wrote (17712)	5/1/2002 6:35:57 PM
From: Starowl	Respond to of 21142

Don, I agree with you strongly on this one. Are the VOD vendors going to get together and make their systems interoperable with open architecture just to help the MSOs? Not likely. Proprietary systems are what spur innovation. They're all riding in the same pipe and streaming the same stuff to the same equipment. AOL-TW wants plug and play vendors for VOD. Of course they do. But I can't see Seachange and Concurrent servers side by side. But maybe I should read Baumgartner's article before commenting!

To: Don Hand who wrote (17712)	5/1/2002 9:35:12 PM
From: James M. Bash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21142

Read: Vaporware, In Theory, Not Anytime Soon, and Don't Hold Your Breath... These real-time systems are incredibly complex and finely-tuned, and it could be a real long while (if ever) that they are "plug-and-play" from end-to-end. Looking at the flip side, when/if it comes, it could be a big boon to the entrenched players. They really do have a huge headstart in technology, integration, experience, and relationships. In the meantime, this article reminds me of previous armchair prognoses, all of which have been off base. Competition has been around for ages, if I had enough time I could even dig back to "scary" posts here in past years about introductions of new Sun, SGI, and Unisys systems intended to take the VOD world by storm. Didn't happen. And if you want exposure to a pure play VOD vendor, you still have only two choices. Incumbent VOD vendors, meanwhile, aren’t exactly running for cover under the incoming hail of new competition. That’s because, they argue, it’s difficult to build a scalable VOD system without the proper service optimization. Besides, time is still on the side of the incumbents, says Concurrent’s Chism. "In many respects, the war is going to be over 18 to 24 months from now. The runway is getting shorter." SeaChange’s Gordon-Kanouff disagrees with the notion that the plug-and-play scenario also refers to video servers, which are tailored specifically for integration with on-demand services on a broadband network. Adding specifications and standards "doesn’t make our equipment plug-and-play," she argues. "It just makes it easier for us to work with all of the different non-VOD components that MSOs work with." Whether VOD components can become plug-and-play is subject to interpretation, offers Naresh Makhijani, Diva’s general manager of on-demand systems. "If you define the server as the box, then I think the answer is no," he says. "If you define the server as the server system, and you have interfaces for billing and content and applications that are commonly defined, then, as a system, you should be able to replace one for the other." "VOD is not about servers," says nCUBE Corp. President and CEO Mike Pohl. "It’s about the ability to wrap around all of the business logic and everything else you need to run that business." "The real value is on the software side," Chism agrees, noting that vendors attempting to muscle their way in could be "multiple years behind in that area." And nice to see this: "For an emerging service like 'Maestro,' AOL Time Warner’s everything-on-demand project, peak usage is expected to surge to unprecedented levels."