Sun Microsystems seeks profit from Internet TV

Sun Microsystems' bread and butter is selling general-purpose servers, but on Wednesday the company began selling a product extremely specialized to cram as many streams of video onto the Internet as possible.

The Sun Streaming System consists of a video-streaming software, a handful of ordinary Sun servers, Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" storage systems and the highlight, the X4950 Streaming Switch. In a top-end $8 million configuration, the X4950 holds 2 terabytes of memory, 32 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports, and can pump out 160,000 simultaneous video streams onto the network.

Most TV shows today are broadcast over the air or cable distribution networks, but Sun's new system lets people select which shows they want to see and when they want to see them. This "video-on-demand" world resembles ordering DVDs through the mail with Netflix or watching recorded video using TiVo, only the TiVo is a server that doesn't run out of hard drive space and the movies are sent nearly instantly over the Internet through a technology called IPTV--Internet Protocol television.


Más información:

• Sun Wants Its IPTV (eWeek.com)
• Sun Launches New Video Delivery Over IP Platform With Highest Video Streaming Throughput in the Industry(PRNewswire)

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