The Potential Market for Intranet Streaming

Several companies are betting that streaming video and audio will become a standard method of communication in the world of large corporations. Digital Pipe (http://www.digitalpipe.com) and Eloquent ( http://www.eloquent.com) are two of the companies currently offering a solution to the corporate market. These companies believe that corporate efficiency can be increased through the organization of video and audio files, which are necessary to the corporation's employee training programs, board presentations or any other type of communication effectively accomplished with multimedia.

Digital Pipe announced today that it is positioning itself to grab a piece of the corporate market with the launch of its nCORE solution. Digital Pipe's nCORE solution is designed to take advantage of the bandwidth within a corporate LAN rather then the public Internet. Digital Pipe states that by eliminating inter-office connectivity limitations the entire user base can access high-resolution video of 300kps to 2 Mps.

The system the Digital Pipe will build differs for each company, but does include the installation of custom built servers for streaming, caching, and encoding, which can support all three platforms and are managed remotely by Digital Pipe. Additionally, Digital Pipe is partnering with Saba and other companies focusing on corporate educational videos. Digital Pipe would like to aggregate this type of content and offer it as a value added service to their clients.

Eloquent has a slightly different approach to managing multimedia within the enterprise. Digital Pipe emphasizes that their solution is hands-off, and they will manage the assets themselves. Eloquent sells its 6.0 server standard with software that allows the corporate users to create custom presentations for distribution within the company. Eloquent's server also supports all three formats. Additionally, it supports its own proprietary format, which allows for the maximum amount of customization of the video presentation using their software. The software, which comes loaded on their server, allows the users to take polls, insert slides along with the video and customize the presentation in various ways.

Each company scales their solution depending on the size of their client. Eloquent sells their server for $125,000, and various service packages to accompany the server are available. Eloquent also offers leasing packages for single or multiple servers. Digital Pipe leases their servers and states that with a one-year contract a company can typically be set up for a cost of $5/user/month. That costs assumes that the system will run on a Windows only platform. If the corporation wants to include Real and does not already own a license, the cost can increase to about $10/user/month.