Microsoft Corp yesterday formally unveiled its conception of video-on-demand with launch of its Tiger software for providing movies, interactive shopping and other complex services over cable – all designed to run on cheap personal computer servers running Windows NT. Some people assume that video-on-demand is a hardware problem for massively parallel machines, but it’s really a software issue, Nathan Myhrvold, senior vice-president of advanced technology, said. Microsoft claims that the NT Advanced Server-based Tiger, will be capable of providing tens of thousands of users with split-second access to thousands of videos and other continuous media files, and enable them to perform such VCR-like functions as pause, reverse or fast-forward. The software is scalable from an individual computer with a single user, on a small private network for companies or schools, or on a large-scale network serving entire cities. Compaq Computer Corp and Intel Corp joined the party to say they are working on media-servers to take advantage of Tiger – which is still being refined in Microsoft’s laboratories. It will be tested in the Seattle area by Tele-Communications Inc with Microsoft employees later this year, and residential tests will be conducted in Seattle and Denver in 1995. Tiger provides the management system for handling hundreds of concurrent streams, linking together media servers Microsoft calls Tiger cubs, which have limited computing power but large amounts of storage capacity arranged as a parallel array. Bits of each video or media file are spread out among the array of disks, then reassembled by Tiger in the right order to be transmitted to individual users. Two copies of each file are stored across the array, so if any drive fails, the back-up copy can be accessed and the transmission won’t be interrupted. Microsoft sees a wide variety of customers for Tiger, including cable and telephone companies, libraries, hotels, hospitals, advertising agencies and television newsrooms. It reckons the software could be used for hotel and airline entertainment systems, corporate telecommuting and video messaging, and transmitting X-rays and other patient data between hospitals and doctors. Advertising agencies agencies could use it to manage libraries of commercials and video projects, it reckons.Intel demonstrated its scalable multi-server technology at the preview of the Tiger Continuous Media Server Architecture, using a machine with 16 Pentiums claimed to be capable of delivering over 3,000 simultaneous video streams with full VCR control. The demonstration system also included 32 2Gb disks – sufficient for some 50 feature-length movies. It is designed to scale to hundreds of Pentiums with Intel’s scalable interconnect – at which point it is just like a massively parallel system.
