Sun Microsystems Inc says it has cemented around a dozen new alliances with broadcast and digital media companies in a bid to expand its exposure in the market including an arrangement with RealNetworks Inc (see separate story). The company has also announced version 1.0 of new StorEdge Media Central Software it claims enables users to manage the distribution of all digital content from internet to television broadcasts. The software includes Java-based video beans and APIs enabling third party applications to be integrated. Sun claims that at the high-end a system will be able to provide 26 hours of online storage and eight channels. An entry-level system includes a UE250 server and A1000 disk array. It costs from $62,000 with two multichannel decoders from the third quarter. Sun is getting VisionTech Ltd’s MPEG-2 codec video streaming technology up on Solaris and will co-market the solution.
