Where Fujitsu Ltd is developing its own complete video-on-demand system (CI No 2,480), NEC Corp is taking a short cut and licensing the video server software developed by Starlight Network Inc, Mountain View, California. Starlight’s software runs on an iAPX-86-based server under Unix, and originally, back in 1992, supported only 20 users on a 50MHz 80486 machine. With the arrival of faster Pentiums, and work done on it by NEC, it now supports up to 200. NEC’s system, to be available early next year,will be aimed at business customers to start with because of the low number of concurrent streams supported. The system may also generate demand at schools as a teaching instrument, NEC said.
