A new streaming media cache could speed real-time content over the internet. Inktomi Corp and RealNetworks Inc have unveiled a joint development, marketing and distribution agreement to integrate Real’s RealSystem G2 streaming media server with Inktomi’s Traffic Server caching technology. For a good example of how the new product might be used, the American Health Network was overwhelmed in June by unexpectedly high demand for video footage of the birth of a child which AHN broadcast over the internet (CI No 3,434). With the Inktomi/Real software, that video could have been delivered to other internet service providers for redistribution to their subscribers in turn, easing the load on the original content provider and making it possible for more people to view the event in relative comfort. As Paul Gauthier, chief technology officer for Inktomi, says: This kind of data is unusually sensitive to network conditions. If you’re streaming out of a cache, though, there is no packet loss and no loss of quality. Inktomi’s principal rivals in the caching business are Cobalt Networks Inc and Network Appliance Inc, both of which sell combined hardware/software caches. Their specialized boxes run stripped-down operating systems with code tweaked to maximize performance. Inktomi sniffs at this internet toaster approach, saying its own all-software caching server is more open and even offers better price-performance when capacity is taken into account. The typical single-node Traffic Server configuration requires a dual processor UltraSparc 2 and pair of Traffic Server licenses. Gauthier estimates that for $80,000 to $90,000 an internet service provider can handle a T3’s worth of streaming media traffic. When you look at the internet toasters, he says, the individual unit cost is smaller but you need more units. What’s more, the fact that Traffic Server is a plain vanilla Solaris application made it easy for Inktomi to offer media caching – and hard for rivals to catch up, or so Gauthier claims. We have taken Real’s code base and integrated it straight into Traffic Server. We need to use their streaming engine, because rewriting one from scratch is a completely unfathomable (sic) problem. Senior analyst for Collaborative Research Inc, Peter Christy, agrees: Because Real Networks’ media server is also a Solaris application, it’s easy to get them to play well together. Christy also questions the economics of the internet toaster companies’ small hardware runs, compared with the economies of scale a giant like Sun Microsystems can achieve. There’s no particular value in building your own box, he says. Keeping a local copy of real-time content makes a lot of technical sense, but it’s still keeping a copy, with all the copyright snarls that act implies. To allay the fears of content owners, Inktomi has made sure the origin server retains control of what the Traffic Server can deliver. People who are supplying streaming content on the internet even more sensitive to its use than people supplying ordinary web content, Gauthier says. They tend to be in the business of intellectual property, so they have very stringent copyright protection requirements. Collaborative’s Christy adds: It’s clear to the people who have a vested financial interest in content that this scheme doesn’t require them to lose control.
