Video networking equipment specialist, First Virtual Corp and the Networking Hardware Division of IBM Corp said they are working together to jointly market integrated video networking systems for the internet. The move is under the umbrella of the Next Generation Internet initiative, which is being driven by the US Federal Government, universities and private industry to provide the internet with capabilities that are currently missing from the existing internet structure. In particular this includes the ability to handle multimedia applications, such as real-time interactive video, stored and live video-on-demand. By using First Virtual’s expertise in business and broadcast video networking and IBM’s experience in end-to-end networking, the two can now provide customers with video-based internet offerings. First Virtual’s products include the V-Room videoconferencing product that uses existing building wiring to connect the room-systems to a centralized ATM backbone, cutting the cost of installing Inverse Mux and ISDN switch technology as well as the V-Cache family of fault tolerant storage devices for multimedia files that enable network managers to off-load large multimedia files from the data LAN to a ‘video overlay’ ATM network and make the most of ATM for the recording and playback of multimedia files in any format.
