Sun Microsystems jumps into IPTV market

Sun Microsystems has decided to jump into the IPTV market with a video on demand (VoD) system, targeted primarily at telcos although there's no reason cable companies couldn't use it as well. Sun's system is claimed to have ten times the capacity of any other VoD server now on the market.

What Sun has brewed up is an offering its calling the Sun Streaming System that, in its maximum configuration, can dish up 160,000 simultaneous video streams, pumping the video out to users via 32 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports. Such a high end configuration will cost only about $50 per video stream, or around $8 million in total, Sun said. Such a configuration could also store the entire Netflix video library - about 60,000 movie titles - in a single six foot high storage rack.
What Sun has crafted compares to estimates of as much as $200 to $250 per stream from competitors, although with the IPTV industry in its infancy those first-to-market prices are sure to tumble rapidly. Sun's new system consists of the Sun's own streaming software, the Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch, standard Sun Fire X4100 and X4500 servers, and Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" storage systems. The keys to the system are the new switch and the Thumpers.

Video on demand and IPTV are expected to become widely available by 2010. It's not clear whether Sun's offering will mate with Microsoft's IPTV offering, replacing the VoD server in Microsoft TV, or whether it will only work with other vendors' middleware. Microsoft, in a pitch for its IPTV system a few weeks ago, bragged of a string of new hardware vendors whose offerings worked with Microsoft TV - and Sun was on that list. Notably, Nortel has signed up as the lead reseller for the Sun Streaming System and Nortel is, separately, in bed with Microsoft on the VoIP side of the house.