The commodity disk drive market is getting so tough that Micropolis Corp is looking to create a new business sideline building its disk drives into video-on-demand servers. It announced its first such product, the AV Server 100, earlier this year (CI No 2,389) and is has now been retained by Matsushita Avionics Development Corp to help develop an audio and video-on-demand system for airline in-flight entertainment systems. The Chatsworth, California company says that first fruits of the co-operative effort are expected to fly in mid-1995. Matsushita System 2000E is an interactive video and audio system offering fully integrated in-seat telephone, personal computer and Nintendo Co games, and other interactive functions. The server will include an array of Micropolis disk drives, redundant power supplies and cooling fans to provide fault-tolerance. Each system will be capable of providing several feature-length movies and music tracks.
