Vendors Take On Streaming-Media Management

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June 15, 1998 (8:25 AM EDT)

By Richard Karpinski,

With Microsoft and RealNetworks left standing as the two giants of Web streaming media, other vendors are staking their claims with strategies to help users with real-world deployments.

Next week, Starlight Networks will launch StarCenter, a streaming-media management platform that works not only with its own streaming media engine, but also with Microsoft's NetShow and RealNetworks' RealAudio and RealVideo.

This week, Resonate, a developer of traffic management software, added support for RealNetworks streams in its Central Dispatch platform.

Both the Starlight and Resonate products are designed to help users get a better grip on managing content and distributing multimedia streams across the Internet and within the intranet.

Meanwhile, enterprise giants Oracle and IBM outlined the latest developments in their own streaming-media strategies, signaling they are not ready to concede the market quite yet.

"The market is growing very rapidly, and there's a need for vendors not only to help companies implement a solution, but also to help them manage it once it is implemented," according to analyst Greg Tapper of the Giga Information Group.

"The big war is really the API [application programming interface] platform war between RealNetworks and [Microsoft's] NetShow," said Jim Long, Starlight's chairman and co-founder. "But it takes more than just good bit-pump technology to make things work."

Starlight's StarCenter works in conjunction with the leading video servers. It brokers requests between clients and servers; selects content based on available bandwidth; provides content management, authoring, and archiving tools; and also provides usage reporting.

"One of the biggest problems we have is the ability to track what each client is doing as far as what video assets they're viewing and what priority they have on seeing those assets," said David Winig, video production development manager at Bloomberg Television, a StarCenter beta site.

StarCenter is available now in beta. Pricing begins at $25,000.

Resonate, meanwhile, is taking a more bandwidth-oriented approach. The company's Central Dispatch 2.1.1, which runs on Sun Microsystems' Solaris and Microsoft's Windows NT, can now provide load-balancing and intelligent-mirroring for RealNetworks and other streaming-media servers.

Traffic management for media servers is a bit tricky, said Resonate president and CEO Chris Marino, because they deliver two separate streams -- a TCP/IP-based control stream and a User Datagram Protocol-based content stream.

The result is companies deploying streaming media typically hard-code links to content to specific machines and IP addresses. That makes managing content and bringing servers up and down a tricky task, Marino said.

Elsewhere, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle next week will began shipping the final version of its Oracle Video Server 3.0 release, including support for VCR-type features for video on demand, real-time digital encoding, and Java-based administration. Oracle Video Server 3.0 sells for $295 per concurrent video stream supported.

Meanwhile, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM outlined its plans this week to add "e-media" to its much-hyped e-business strategy. It outlined broad plans to add rich media capabilities to its product line, including its WebSphere application servers, IBM commerce servers, and Lotus LearningSpace training application.