Video on Demand & IPTV
In terms of change to the broadcast, entertainment and television industries, few have had as much impact, and promise as much potential as Video on Demand (VoD) and IPTV (Internet Protocol Television).
VoD and IPTV implementations allow consumers to customize their data, voice and video programming. This can also empower a growing variety of content providers, in a number of new tiers and markets, to directly access new audiences, often unavailable to them on traditional television.
IPTV refers to a mechanism that data, voice and video are delivered on an IP network, through either broadcast or on-demand services. IPTV is often played on a wide variety of devices including PCs, TVs, PDAs, and most recently mobile phones. This is a fast growing sector, which some market analysts predict will achieve revenues of $50 billion by 2010.
VoD implementations are found on IP as well as broadcast, satellite and cable implementations. They represent a huge investment to providers in these markets, but offer huge potential income opportunities.
All of this new content needs to be stored somewhere, regardless of it being data, voice or video. Storage is where that content is held, and as such, it plays a significant part in the rapidly growing VoD and IPTV industry. More importantly, as IP networking is usually the only transport mechanism for all of these new services, storage will also be delivered in this unified common IP network in the most successful and cost effective implementations.
One of the major challenges facing video delivery is storage bandwidth. Previously, solutions available to the industry have been expensive and inefficient Direct Attached Storage (DAS), or complex and inherently costly Fibre Channel (FC) SAN (storage area network) storage solutions.
- The storage architecture has to be able to scale. The ability to satisfy performance and capacity requirements, independently, is key.
- A common infrastructure is needed, ideally all IP-based to leverage existing expertise and infrastructure.
- The chosen solution must deliver multiple Gb per second throughput, performance that exceeds FC networks or DAS storage.
- Data protection becomes ever more critical, with integration of backup software applications from a variety of vendors, while providing disaster recovery capability through replication.
- Ease of management is a critical component of any solution to be implemented.
Fortunately, proven and scalable IP network storage based on Internet Protocol (IP) is available from Intransa. Intransa scalable video storage offers the industry's highest performance with simple to deploy IP infrastructure with 10GbE interfaces. With scalability from 2 to 1,500TB and throughput of up to 3,000Mb/second, our video storage solutions are ideal for IPTV, VoD and other video distribution requirements.
The Intransa architecture used in our StorStac system leverages our proven, IP-based infrastructure solutions to deliver independent scalability and capacity growth with high availability, yet affordably with true ease-of-use built in. With our integrated StorStac GUI management system, Intransa solutions provide seamless, easy-to-use management that scales as your needs grow, without the cost and complexity of legacy solutions. And our StorAlliance technology partners deliver best-in-class solutions as part of a comprehensive answer to IPTV and VoD industry needs, integrated into the Intransa solution.