Oracle Corp has made most of the running so far among database vendors in the interactive video-on-demand world, but Sybase Inc does not intend to miss all the fun, and its New Media Division, formed in Mountain View, California has been outlining its plans for providing Internet and interactive television tool and server software. Its interactive server software currently runs on Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp servers – it has three wins so far, all under HP-UX – but versions for Sun Microsystems Inc and Silicon Graphics Inc are on the way. The company also announced New Media Partners Developers Colleges, to start in September with a series of interactive television developer seminars and workshops jointly sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, PowerTV Inc, Scientific-Atlanta Inc and Sybase, backed by the first fully integrated end-to-end interactive television developers kit, consisting of the Hewlett MediaStream Server video server, Scientific-Atlanta’s Digital Home Communication Terminal, the PowerTV operating system development environment and the Sybase Intermedia software product family, including the new Sybase New Media Studio development environment – Centro Digital Pictures Ltd of Hong Kong is using it to develop its next generation of interactive television applications. The New Media Studio environment is a Windows95, Windows NT, and Unix development system for video and cable networks that can be accessed from both personal computer clients and set-top boxes running the Interplay client software. Interplay supports Windows95, Mac OS, Microware Systems Corp’s OS-9 and OS-9000, Power TV, and Windows 3.1. The New Media unit employs 150 people and in September plans to announce an array of tools for managing and anaysing on-line transactions, as well as tools for customising and creating Hypertext Mark-up Language interfaces. The three Sybase wins are BellSouth Corp’s video-on-demand trial in Chamblee, Georgia, Singapore Telcom Ltd’s system, which is planned to cover 3m homes, and the Southern New England Telecomunications Inc trial in Hartford, Connecticut.
