Edgeware was supposed to be a one trick pony that would never survive the IPTV revolution, but at IBC last week we met with it for the fourth consecutive show and the company is not only still standing, it is able to point at rivals and say, ‘It’s not such an easy trick to copy.’
The trick in question is turning a pile of flash chips into an inexpensive, resilient, easy to re-configure, VoD server for both IPTV and HTTP networks. This is not taking pre-configured Flash Disks drives and linking them up, but tightly integrating the chips so that you have a unified, single 6 Terrabyte, 20 Gbps resource that can deliver thousands of streams.
Duncan Potter, Edgeware chief marketing officer said, ‘It’s not quite so easy to do what we do. A number of companies have announced products that do the same thing, but none of them have delivered.’ When we asked him specifically about rival Seachange International, which is known to have announced a copy cat product over a year ago, he added, ‘That product has still not been delivered to any customers.’
All of the real Edgeware intelligence is contained in a Field Programmable Gate Array, sitting next to the Flash chips, in a system that can deliver through RTP (Real time Transport Protocol) or HTTP.
‘Our servers support any kind of streaming that you want, Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft IIS Silverlight or Apple Live. Last year only 3% of our revenues came from HTTP. This year it’s already closer to 25%. At last IBC we were seeing Requests for Proposals that were worded more like requests for information, and very little actual implementation went ahead. This year there is a very different feel to video over the internet. People are coming back to us and we are doing implementation studies, not proofs of concept, and iOS is right at the top of most agendas,’ said Potter.
Clearly part of the reason for Edgeware having at least the streaming side of the VoD equation to itself is because the market just wasn’t there before, so next year Edgeware will move to a common server architecture, where the same hardware can be used for Web streaming delivery or for IPTV, or both rather than support two slightly different systems.
Edgeware was part of an announcement last week with partners Envivio and Verimatrix, which will offer a new end to end OTT offering using the Verimatrix VCAS conditional access system and its ViewRight Web client family; Envivio contributing its 4Caster C42 encoders and Edgeware based WTV servers for VoD, all tightly integrated and pre-tested.
Edgeware announced at the show that it has a major new streaming client in Telecom Slovenia’s Planet 9 multimedia and services integration subsidiary to provide specialized video servers as a key component of its IPTV delivery system. Slovenia however is one of the smallest European countries, so it’s not so big a deal.
Another VoD server company at the show, Concurrent Computer, said that it has a field trial of a similar technology to Edgeware, built around general purpose Dell R710 servers and using solid state disk, delivering 40 Gbps of streams from a 3.2 TB 2 Unit rack. ‘A unit like this can serve 40,000 simultaneous video requests,’ said a spokesman at the show ‘and will run Apple, Microsoft or Adobe adaptive streaming.’ He said that the trial was with a European cable operator. That specification seems to finally put it in the same league as the Edgeware product line.