By Cliff Mercer, Ph.D., and Satish Menon, Ph.D., Kasenna, Inc.
Pioneering technologists and business leaders have been driving our industry toward new ways of watching and interacting with our televisions, that is, toward an “everything-on-demand” future. Accomplishing this lofty goal requires the cost-effective implementation of “extreme narrowcasting” techniques, which in turn demand coordinated use of network technologies, powerful server architectures, and intelligent software design. The early Video-On-Demand (VOD) solutions of the past with their proprietary interconnection technologies and custom hardware designs fail to scale cost-effectively with the new demands for flexible integration with new services, delivery performance and storage capacity. Advances in commercial off-the-shelf computing and networking products along with smart software design meet these current and future challenges cost-effectively and without the obsolescence problem