Tektronix Inc is expanding its video business by selling a Spotlight video streaming server for corporate intranets which combines a home-grown streaming program running on Silicon Graphics Inc Origin servers with MediaBase software. It expects Starlight Networks Inc to be its closest competitor, but says the Mountain View, California-based company’s StarWorks offering uses a proprietary streaming protocol and has no encoder – though it is offered for use with MPEG 2. Tektronix says it will upgrade Spotlight from MPEG 1 to MPEG 2 once the new version begins to take off. It streams video over Ethernet using either an RTP Reliable Streaming Protocol to pump data into a video server store, or RTP IP multicasting to multiple display clients. It is RSVP and RTCP-compliant. A browser plug-in enables images to be seen from any browser. The encoder converts analog NTSC or PAL format video into an MPEG-1 digital stream and can be managed from a browser.
