Bytes, camera - action!

Video is being drawn to digital technology like a moth to a cathode-ray tube. Two recent announcements in video technology - one focused on its distribution, the other on its creation - exemplify the entertainment media's migration from reels and sprockets to bits and bytes.

The distribution product combines technologies from caching vendor InfoLibria and storage solution company Avid Technologies into a solution that supports edgecasting of streaming media.

"Content providers need to distribute their content in a high-quality format over the Internet, which is becoming a burgeoning distribution format for media," said Douglas Gowell, director of new business development for Avid's networking solutions group.

The resulting product integrates Avid's shared storage and file distribution technology with InfoLibria's MediaMall, a technology that brings streaming media caching and delivery to the edge of the network.

This capacity lets a provider save traffic over the backbone by edgecasting, or splitting a single media stream into multiple streams just before delivering it to end users. With the Avid/MediaMall technology, it's split into up to 1600 individual streams at once. MediaMall's proprietary technology means that the streams are presented in uncompressed format, providing TV-quality video or CD-quality audio.

"It's essentially a broadband-format product," said Shayam Jha, vice president of marketing for Info-Libria. "You sit it right next to a DSL [access multiplexer] or cable headend, where it works in conjunction with Layer 4 switches." The new system also offers opportunities for a cable Internet or DSL provider to customize programming.

Back in the creation side of the process - where video programming is assembled before being distributed - video networking specialist Artel Video Systems has contributed new customer-controlled switching to GTE's VideoConnect, an IP network offering high-quality video transport for commercial and movie producers in Los Angeles.

"VideoConnect is optimized for film studios, which have many different formats of video and need to send it many places around town immediately," said Dan Poranski, vice president of marketing for Artel. Serving all those needs poses some technological challenges. For one thing, it means handling many formats, analog and digital, over the same equipment. Video special effects people prefer to work in digital format, for example, but audio creators prefer analog signals because they are less choppy.

In the VideoConnect system, an encoder brings the video signal from the external site into the GTE network where it's decoded and fed into an Artel router. Software gives the content customers the control to permit on-the-fly routing and format conversions, while GTE technicians control the billing and scheduling at the back end of the service. This is more cost-efficient than the old system of nailed-up point-to-point network connections.

GTE also is considering long-distance video transport to Bell Atlantic's New York network, Poranski said.

Because the FCC required that TV stations in the 30 largest markets begin digital broadcasts on Nov. 1, the VideoConnect system should prove a boon to Hollywood TV broadcasters, who now can use it for IP transport of Dodger baseball games and City Hall press events.

"When you build a service like this, all of a sudden you've also got a terrific service to fill your local television needs," Poranski said. "The quality is superior, your transmission is immediate, you can archive it and that microwave truck you might otherwise have to scramble is now back in the garage waiting to go to the big accident that's about to happen on the interstate."