IBM Corp has won someone over to the concept of using the mainframe as a video server, but as the customer is California Polytechnic State University, it is not clear that it is a true commercial sale. The Polytechnic says it is looking to develop a networked instructional environmental system based on an ES/9000 used as a megaservers, and describes the system as a virtual university to provide students with on-demand access to full-motion video lectures, demonstrations and self-paced tutorials, electronic mail and conferencing, and provide staff with the tools to develop multimedia courseware on the system. It reckons the IBM mainframe is the only system available with the capacity for concurrent support of hundreds of video streams plus the large number of users requiring simultaneous access to the network. Non-IBM systems will be integrated at a later date.
