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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: killybegs who wrote (5859)	2/26/1999 3:09:00 PM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Memo to Mr. Bramson and other CEOs: get involved with Abilene! You need to get involved with Abilene. Internet2 is what Ampex is waiting for and preparing for. Helping develop the digital video networking technology and standard, and getting access to the technical specs early, would be a big benefit to the company (or should I say consortium?). Some ways to get involved: Contribute a representative to a standards working group. Become a corporate partner as IBM did and connect. Testing of digital video transmission on Internet2 will show TVontheWeb and Ampex what is possible and let you modify your products to fit. (see link and excerpt below) Ampex needs to do more than just buy some other companies and transform itself into a broadcaster - it needs to use the storage and compression technology it already has to get an edge in the Internet broadcasting business, while at the same time using its recent acquisitions to develop and demonstrate an integrated Internet video-on-demand solution which can be bundled with the Ampex DST and sold. Integrated means DST + front end disk array + retrieval software + video server software for Solaris and for NT. There is going to be a lot of broadcasting competition, eventually. Up till now the government has issued licenses to broadcasters allowing them to use part of the limited electromagnetic spectrum. (And local governments have licensed cable providers as well.) When everyone has fiber optic going into their living room, the spectrum limitation will be irrelevant. First of all, the "light" range of the EM spectrum has much greater bandwidth than the "radio" or "TV" parts. Second, the new spectrum range is not a single one shared by all but rather one which can be duplicated in every fiber. And we can pull as many fibers as we want. Thus, a customer can potentially have more personal bandwidth than currently exists for all the over-the-airwaves channels combined. Thus, the rationale for licensing is not applicable to the Internet. Anybody who wants will be able to go into business as an Internet broadcaster, from an individual with a cheap "video cam" mounted on his head (already being done since years) to the big networks. Just as with the textual and graphical content, the huge amount of free stuff which will be offered is going to make it hard to charge fees for content. Hence, Ampex's best bet IMO is making the best integrated solution for the big networks. You know that Sony and others won't let this market go unchallenged either, but I think that Ampex is in a good position here, on their home turf geographically as well as intellectually. cnn.com (IDG) -- IBM on Wednesday became the first corporate partner to be approved to connect to the Abilene, which will serve as the backbone network for Internet2. IBM will be connecting several of its research facilities using Abilene, including the company's Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and Almaden, Calif. labs. In so doing IBM will also be able to work with other major Internet2 research labs in trying to sculpt the first advanced Internet applications, such as middleware products to govern traffic over high-speed networks and a range of different applications that will tightly integrate video, audio, and voice. "Working with the Internet2 community, we will be building more powerful applications that will be feasible only on a backbone like Abilene," said John Patrick, vice president in charge of IBM's Internet technology. "We hope this will lead customers into the next era of e-business as these applications migrate over to the commercial Internet." IBM has spent over $5.6 million to date in supporting the universities that are participating in the Internet2 initiative. The company has had an influence in shaping the Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure initiative as well as the Internet2 Digital Video Network projects. Abilene's primary purpose is to support Internet2 development of broadband applications and engineering management tools for research and education. The backbone began operation in January.