Intel Digs Deeper Into Streaming

From enhanced processor power and plug-and-play devices to the launch of Convera Corp., Intel (www.intel.com) has its fingers in multiple pieces of the streaming pie, it was revealed during a keynote address at Streaming Media West today. The evolution of the PC and the exponential growth of Intel's Pentium processor embraces and enhances broadband content like never before, and the future is looking even brighter, according to Gerry Parker, executive vice president, general manager of Intel's New Business Group.

"If you look at the PC trend … it's really more than just the CPU. We tend to talk in terms of Megahertz and obviously Pentium I, II, III, IV. But really, the rest of the PC has to come along at the same rate. It's important for everything to evolve and interestingly enough, that evolution has occurred," said Parker.

Parker's demonstration included an interesting look at the rate of broadband's evolution in relation to that of the PC. Until now, Moore's law has been Intel's best friend. However, as Parker commented, bandwidth advocates would argue that bandwidth is growing at a faster rate, while Moore's law is slowing down.

"Let's just agree that in general, they're certainly going at an excellent rate. The only minor detail is that it's a lot easier to get a Pentium IV in your house than an OC 192," said Parker.

While most homes are still dialing-up to the Internet, one of Intel's challenges is to entice consumers with content, advanced services and new technologies to push the demand for broadband to the home.

Optimizing the use of bandwidth is one of Intel's main objectives. Parker believes that harnessing the power of the processor provides a better end-user experience and reduces costs in the process.

Parker used the example of a layered video codec developed by Intel labs to improve the user experience at any given connection speed.

"Simplistically, when you author the image once --and by having it scalable -- it gets downloaded at whatever bandwidth is available and then lets the processor effectively render it," said Parker.

UPnP

Universal plug-and-play (UPnP) is Intel's solution to the complexity of the home network. The appliance builds on existing standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and XML, providing a framework of standards for synchronization among all the different devices that may exist on your home network.

"As these consumer devices become enabled with plug-and-play, I can just plug them right into the network and they'll announce themselves," said Parker.

Intel demonstrated a home network audio server running on the Linux operating system that can be controlled by any device throughout the network. Support is currently available on Windows ME, and the devices should be out in early 2001.

Convera

Intel and Excalibur (www.excalib.com) announced its new publicly traded company, Convera Corp., in September of this year. Ron Whittier, chairman and CEO of Convera, joined Parker on the keynote stage to add some insight into the group's activities.

"Effective next week, December 21, a division from Intel [the Interactive Media Services Division] will combine with Excalibur technology, a leader in indexing search capability for a variety of content types…" said Whittier.

Whittier explained that Convera is in the opportunity space for people who provide services that sit on top of the infrastructure in terms of hardware platform, connectivity and bandwidth.

"Services range from fundamental proprietary technologies in the area of indexing and search so that you can, in the exploding world of digital content, find the digital asset you're looking for," explained Whittier.

Convera recently announced a long-term partnership with the NBA, and Whittier provided a demonstration of "My Highlights" -- an indexing function strikingly familiar to the Virage solution. Users can access highlights of four featured NBA games each day and define parameters such as team, player and offense or defense performance to customize the viewer experience.

"We're going from the four [games] we do per day now into the entire season over the course of the next year. It opens the space to be able to deliver products like this and sell them in a variety of forms to the consumer. You could package it as a subscription service, you can do complimentary ads, or you can do what you want," Whittier said.