Massively parallel systems builder nCube Corp, Foster City, California sees a serious market for its machines as media servers, if only it can fit them out with enough extensions to best the stiff competition for what is at present a tiny market. The company claims its new Metromedia Server is the industry’s first interactive digital media server capable of delivering interactive-television content to metro-class installations of tens of thousands of simultaneous users. It integrates management of video, audio, text, image, and tabular data, and claims it makes it possible to deploy interactive services such as video-on-demand and home shopping, interactive training and video annotated electronic mail for business users on a large scale. It used the next-generation nCube 3 version of the company’s processor and is claimed to deliver up to 28,800 simultaneous video streams from up to 24.4Tb disk storage, or around 30,000 hours of multimedia content. The thing will be available next quarter at $500 per video stream for a fully configured system.
