SCTE Orlando 2004 Tec Expo: What We Are Showing
By Steve Rose
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Interactive Content Engines LLC – Cable Tec Expo 2004
What We Are Showing
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
The natural focus in our booth is on the pretty client displays showing the content stored on our server. While this is the “beauty” part, what we are really trying to show is the four old portable computers on the shelf behind, running the Interactive Content Engines server platform, providing the content.
Why are we using “ancient” portable computers to show our server technology?
Our platform is designed for commodity hardware. In our labs we use 1U Xeon based boxes with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and four Serial ATA drives each. Our lab arrays are in groups of five servers providing content storage and user interface, with redundant management servers. This gives us excellent stream density in a professional, deployable environment. It is easy to make them look good.
We wanted to use something that shows the power of our architecture, rather than the power of the components. We figured using five year old portables with limited resources would be more effective, as it is hard to make them look good! Sometimes we throw them into a briefcase for our “Server in a Briefcase” demo. If our approach works well on these, you can imagine the performance when we are using Xeons as embedded processors!
The client displays, which are running on standard new computers using the open source VLC player plus our middleware, are there just to prove that the server is generating video streams and putting it out using standard IP protocols. They could just as easily be replaced by QAM modulators with Gigabit Ethernet inputs serving conventional set top boxes (our last public display used Pace settops). The middleware we wrote is not intended to be commercial, it just lets us use these clients for the demo.
We are very proud of our “trick mode” approach, but because of patent issues, we cannot yet demonstrate it. This is fortunate, as we have not yet finished integrating it. In fact, you may see several rough edges in our demo, but we are here because the product is very close to initial deployment (three months) and we are looking for a manufacturing and support partner or licensee. Our initial deployments will be limited to a few customers for whom we can provide excellent service.
