Oracle Corp and nCube Corp appear to have won the bidding for Bell Atlantic Corp’s video-on-demand service, in which they were competing with, among others, IBM Corp bidding an RS/6000-based system (CI No 2,286). Bell Atlantic Corp and Oracle said yesterday that they will make a joint announcement on Wednesday, one of the two that Oracle plans to make with phone companies this week (CI No 2,328), but declined to give further details. But the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times say they will announce that Oracle’s new multimedia database software running on the parallel nCube machines will be the basis of Bell Atlantic’s video on demand and interactive shopping services, which will be delivered over standard phone lines using the Bell Communications Research-developed asymmetric subscriber line system, which enables 1.5Mbps of compressed video to be sent over a phone line that can simultaneously be used for telephony. This is the concept that British Telecommunications Plc is working towards, which suggests that Oracle’s other announcement – with a European phone company – may be with BT. Bell Atlantic’s initial order with Oracle is said to cover four systems that can each deliver as many as 25,000 video streams from the nCube parallel computers, providing capacity for between 100,000 and 200,000 homes. Bell Atlantic plans to connect 250,000 homes this year, a further 1m in 1995, and almost 9m by the end of the decade.IBM is said to be in line for a consolation prize from Bell Atlantic in the shape of an order for its set-top decoders, which use the PowerPC RISC, and cost about $250 apiece in volume.
