An Overview of Interactive Content Engines
By Steve Rose
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Interactive Content Engines LLC
1088 Bishop Street
Suite 4100
Honolulu, HI 96813
(408) 876-4008
(808) 280-8080 (cell)
steve@contentengines.com
www.interactivecontentengines.com
Interactive Content Engines has harnessed low cost, high reliability components in an architecture which meets the needs of VOD / EOD providers at the lowest uncompromised cost per stream (we put the Comm in commodity).
We have used all of the most optimal techniques, industry standards, and architectural characteristics to reduce the cost of our Interactive Content Engines without compromising their reliability, scalability, or potential range of application.
Strong Points of Interactive Content Engines:
- Commodity, server quality components with exceptional internal bandwidth
- Highly reliable “hot swap” disk drives in an architecture that lets us use cooler and far less costly drives
- Gigabit Ethernet switch interconnects managed for optimum throughput by our patent pending management approach
- An architecture that lets us deliver any number of streams, up to the capacity of the server, from a single copy of a piece of content.
- Scalability from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous, completely independent streams.
- The ability to upgrade deployed systems with new technology
- The ability to support any type of content, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and regular data
- Highly optimized moment-by-moment RAM caching giving us the speed and port density advantages of a RAM based server without the very high cost
- Gigabit Ethernet interconnects to last mile transport equipment (which we helped to pioneer)
New Business Opportunities
- The ability to record new content and make it available in moments.
- Real time content, including live events, with NPVR control.
- Centralized, private storage for video home and business security (bad guys will have to find another line of work when the probability of being caught and prosecuted gets close to 100%!)
- The ability to offer a library of thousands of titles, up to everything ever recorded
- Local library of unlimited size
- The cost of offering a piece of content is reduced to the negligible cost of storing an optical disc
- Links to other content libraries around the world
- The ability to offer specialized individual training and education
- The ability to offer local cultural information and resources
- The ability to individually target advertising
- The ability to charge for content provided without commercial interruption
From a business perspective, we also allow a cable operator to remain in control of the content revenue stream. TiVo ™ is under the control of the viewer, with no feedback to the cable operator as to who is bypassing commercials. With a centralized EOD server, the marketing department is back in control of how content may be offered. This applies to individually targeted, opt in marketing, which can be most effectively offered with our server capability.
Everything, Any Time: Interactive Content Engines
