RealNetworks Inc has won an agreement with @Home Networks Inc in what the pair claim will be the first deployment of streaming media on a broadband platform, such as cable. Work has already started and @Home hopes to begin deployment of the infrastructure to its 330,000 or so subscribers in the third quarter of this year. No doubt @Home looked at Microsoft’s Windows Media Player technology as an alternative, but went with RealNetworks instead, but of course nobody would admit to that. RealNetworks is using various high capacity technologies on top of its G2 streaming technology, including high bit rate stream splitting to enable multicast and unicast broadcasts, cache proxies to enable standard caches to support on-demand streaming media and proxy and splitter finding, using the nascent web proxy auto-discovery (WPAD) protocol that enables client software to automatically find the best source of content. RealNetworks will also add advanced SNMP features to enable @Home to configure the broadcasts from a central location.
