MediaCAST Media Appliance

Media Appliances store and stream digital video and audio content on-demand to many people simultaneously selecting different titles, progressing at their rate and sequence.  Content can also be broadcast live over the IP network, similar to television viewing where many people can tune in and watch the same program at the same time.  Media Appliances can be configured for unicast on-demand, unicast live broadcasting and multicast live broadcasting.  There are subtleties between the streaming protocols which our technicians will discuss with your technical personnel during project planning.

Media Appliances come in different hardware configurations to support various numbers of simultaneous video streams and storage capacity. 

• Iridium-level Media Appliance delivers 200 simultaneous on-demand streams (600 streams in broadband-quality) and stores 2,000 hours of DVD-quality video (6,000 hours in broadband-quality). 

• Titanium-level Media Appliance delivers 200 simultaneous on-demand streams (600 streams in broadband-quality) and stores 1,000 hours of DVD-quality video (3,000 hours in broadband-quality).  

• Platinum-level Media Appliance delivers 100 simultaneous on-demand streams (300 streams in broadband-quality) and stores 600 hours of DVD-quality video (1,800 hours in broadband-quality).  Platinum-level units are expandable up to 1,000 hours of storage. 

• Gold-level Media Appliance delivers 100 simultaneous on-demand streams (300 streams in broadband-quality) and stores 400 hours of DVD-quality video (1,200 hours in broadband-quality).   

Media Monster Archiver is used as a redundant backup mechanism for your digital assets.  As content is uploaded  to one or more Media Appliances a copy is automatically placed on the Media Monster Archiver.  This provides a failover and four-point redundancy solution to protect your digital content from potential loss due to unforeseen hardware failure.

• Media Monster Archiver 2.1  Stores up to 2,400 hours of DVD-quality video and other digital assets. In failover configuration streams up to 200 streams of on-demand video. Expandable to the 4.2 model capacity with added hard drives.

• Media Monster Archiver 4.2  Stores up to 4,800 hours of DVD-quality video and other digital assets. In failover streams up to 200 streams of on-demand video.

Through Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, the typical configuration includes streaming server licensing.  Windows Server 2003 provides for Windows Media streaming of video (.wmv) and audio (.wma).  Additional supported video and audio formats include Flash streaming, QuickTime, AVI, MPEG1, 2 and 4 and Real (over http or from the corresponding streaming server application through RTSP or UDP).  MediaCAST supports full Flash Media Server, Apple QuickTime streaming using Darwin Server and Real Networks streaming using Helix Server; please inquire about pricing as it may be an optional upgrade for the Media Appliance. 

As your organization's demand for the number of simultaneous streams increases or more media storage space is required, additional Media Appliances can easily be incorporated.  MediaCAST Enterprise Management allows for automatic content replication, load-balancing and the creation of media server farms.  Our architecture allows scalability in the number of simultaneous streams available for on-demand access into the tens of thousands.  The media farm features allow scaling to a virtually unlimited storage capacity supporting tens of thousands of hours of digital video content.