Sun Microsystems Inc was well ahead of the pack with specially-configured Internet servers, but it has come dangerously close to missing the boat on interactive video servers. Better late than never, its Sun Microsystems Computer Co launched the Sun MediaC enter systems – Sun MediaCenter 5, priced at $30,000; Sun MediaCenter 20, at from $63,000; and the Sun MediaCenter 1000E, starting at $280,000, for delivery in December. The entry server includes 8.4Gb of video storage, capacity for six 30-minute true video-on-demand MPEG-2 or 16 MPEG-1 titles. The MediaCenter 20 is aimed at small- to mid-sized organisations and supports up to 25 MPEG-2 (or 70 MPEG-1) concurrent streams. The big system reaches 100 concurrent MPEG-2 or 270 MPEG-1 streams at high speed. They feature Sun MediaCenter software, device drivers and Fast Ethernet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode network interfaces. The software includes a Media Services layer for content and asset management, title load-unload, stream scheduling, data migration and video streaming to the network interfaces. The things are being pitched for video storage and retrieval, corporate training, video kiosks and video warehousing.
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