Edgeware to Announce Web TV Appliance

 Edgeware will use IBC2008 to announce a new server that reduces the cost of delivering web TV and video services. Based on the  Edgeware solid-state server technology, the new product reduces co-location, power and rack space costs for CDNs and service providers by as much as 90% when compared to nearest competition.

The opportunity to instantaneously reach a single global audience via the World Wide Web is a very attractive proposition for providers of popular premium content whilst for generators of niche content it provides the only cost effective medium for reaching their audience.

However, on the open web, video packets compete with all other traffic on an equal basis giving rise to severe delivery issues. The solution is to distribute dedicated devices across networks that can intelligently cache and rapidly deliver rich-media content according to demand – providing quality of service regardless of congestion.

Traditional video storage architectures have often been restricted to use in centralized data-centers due to the significant cost of ownership associated with their maintenance (disk swaps in arrays) their size (shelf costs) and power consumption. Disk system bottlenecks and hotspots in distributed commodity servers often result in un-predictable performance as viewing patterns change, often all too rapidly in web TV. These servers also require routers and switches for load balancing and connection to the network.

Edgeware is addressing these issues by providing a radically small, cost effective and practically maintenance free server that connects directly to the network. It can be positioned close to the edge of the network to deliver a totally deterministic and scalable video delivery service.