Oracle Corporation, the world's leading supplier of software for managing information, is enabling the Information Age with Oracle Media solutions. This revolutionary suite of software products and services provides complete end-to-end solutions for implementing, running, and managing multimedia applications -from interactive television systems, to corporate training, to CD-ROM titles, and more.
Oracle Media Server, a component of the Oracle Media family of products, provides high-performance, scalable, and reliable multimedia library services on a wide variety of general-purpose computer platforms. Oracle Media Server provides the full range of services needed to deliver sophisticated, interactive multimedia applications to tens of thousands of simultaneous clients-from storage, retrieval and management of movies, music, photographs, and text articles, to the critical customer tracking and billing applications
required to deliver these commercial services, in real time, over the Information Highway.
PORTABLE, OPEN MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS
Oracle Media Server provides a complete set of services for the delivery of multimedia applications, such as video-on- demand, home shopping, video teleconferencing, inter-active learning, and personal-ized newspapers-all without sacrificing the open portability that is the hallmark of Oracle Corporation.
Most modules of the Oracle Media Server-from the sophisticated content manage-ment, customer tracking, and customer billing services, to the highly scalable multimedia stream server-are portable to virtually any hardware or operating system environment, allowing customers to develop a system on hardware from one vendor, and then later move it to a completely different system without any application reprogramming. This important capability allows you to swap in the most cost-effective and high-performance components at any point in time to save money, increase capability, and prevent vendor "lock-in." Portability at all levels- back-end video servers, application servers, networks, set-top boxes, and their associated operating systems -means that compatibility will never be an issue and your investment will never be lost.All Oracle modules are based on standards, where they exist, from the relevant interactive television standards organiza-tions such as ANSI, ISO, MPEG, and DAVIC, all of which Oracle actively partic-ipates in, among others.
MASSIVE SCALABILITY
Oracle Media Server runs on hardware ranging from small systems capable of servicing only a few simulta-neous users, to massively parallel supercomputers which can concurrently serve tens of thousands of video streams, store thousands of hours of video, and handle thousands of transactions per second.
Oracle Media Server's sophis-ticated distributed architecture also allows many servers to work together, allowing seamless application partitioning and virtually infinite scalability. As system usage grows, addi-tional users can be supported by simply plugging in addi-tional hardware cards-or by adding additional servers- and Oracle Media Server will automatically perform load balancing and request routing. Regardless of what load you anticipate, Oracle's proven, benchmarked software scalability is guaranteed to handle your needs.
RELIABILITY
Oracle Media Server is designed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, delivering "video dial-tone" to today's sophisti-cated consumers who expect uninterrupted telecommuni-cations services. Features such as hardware-independent, multimedia software RAID guarantee not only the ability to read data, as in traditional RAID systems, but to continue delivering data from failing hardware subsystems with absolutely no delay of real-time streams.
Oracle's sophisticated multimedia data storage server also guarantees video access, whether all users access different movies or the same movie-without costly data duplication. In large systems with terabytes of online video, these features can reduce hardware and management costs enormously, and make the difference between frequent "glitching" or denial of service and predictable, rock-solid video.
MANAGEABILITY
Oracle Media Server provides the complete set of tools necessary to manage a large online multimedia system, from content, user, and account management screens, to facilities for online rebuilds of RAID disk sets. Oracle Media Server, due to its ability to run on large, single machines capable of servicing tens of thousands of clients, is infinitely more manageable than PC multi-media server approaches, which require you to connect an unmanageable number of small machines together to service the same load. Oracle's fault-tolerant media server handles a huge video and transactional load with one or two machines, making system management truly possible. Oracle Media Server also allows transactional logic to be maintained and performed centrally, increas-ing code re-use and vastly increasing security and manageability. Oracle's standards-based SNMP master/sub-agent architecture and open MIBs even allow you to integrate Oracle Media Server with your existing support infrastructure and to use third-party or custom monitoring tools.
COMPLETE DATA MANAGEMENT
Oracle Media Server combines Oracle's industry-leading ANSI/ISO SQL database, Oracle's sophisticated ConText ™ and Oracle TextServer ™ free-format text management technology, and Oracle or third-party video-stream servers into a complete, unequaled data management engine.
Developers can build sophis-ticated, portable applications which combine all types of audio, video, free-format text, static images, structured tabular data, and animation into appealing multimedia applications. Subscriber authentication, preferences, billing options, viewing restrictions, and transaction services, as well as sophisti-cated server content query capabilities, are all readily available to application developers through open APIs, whether they are using the Oracle Media Objects ™
multimedia authoring tool, or any other third-party application. Oracle's stan-dards- based Boot Service even allows set-top box operating system and file services to be provided by the central media server, further lowering costs while maximizing flexibility and manageability.
KEY FEATURES
PORTABILITY
• Completely portable architecture allows you to choose components to fit your needs. Portable across: Application server operating systems Video-stream servers Networks Set-top boxes
• Modular approach allows custom or third-party plug-in modules
SCALABILITY
• Scalable architecture supports (depending on hardware): Thousands of transactions per second Tens of thousands of simultaneous audio/video streams Terabytes of multimedia data
• Supports micro, SMP, and massively parallel architectures
• Transparently scales across computers
RELIABILITY
• Designed for 24 x 7 operation
• Software RAID
• Automatic rerouting of requests in the event of server failure
MANAGEABILITY
• Complete management tool set for: Multimedia data storage server Structured RDBMS data server Object name and address maintenance Content attribute information Subscriber accounts
• BLOBS Static images and graphics Set-top boot images
• Structured tabular All ANSI-SQL data types Subscriber account information, preferences, billing information, etc. Movie categories, classifications, starring actors, pricing, etc.
• Free-format text Newspaper articles, movie descriptions, etc.
• External data sources CD-ROM titles Existing databases or applications
MULTIMEDIA DATA SERVER
• Support for full "VCR" controls: Play Pause Visual fast-forward and rewind Time-based fast-forward and rewind
• Software multimedia RAID handles: Continuous stream delivery in the event of a failure- read delays such as disk recali-bration, soft or hard block read errors, catastrophic disk or controller subsystem failures Online reconstruction after hot swaps
• Selectable playback bit-rates
• Guaranteed real-time data delivery to outbound video streams
• Guaranteed contention-free data access when: All users accessing different content All users accessing the same content
• No content duplication required for high-usage titles
• User and account manage-ment supports multiple users per account with individual user preferences, user authentication, end-user accounting, and account history inquiry support
• Support for multi-level content classifications and packages with sophisticated, flexible end-user query capability
• Associated product tracking, such as movie reviews, previews, graphics, etc.
• Account or individual user access restrictions
ORACLE MEDIA SOLUTIONS-ENABLING THE INFORMATION AGE
Oracle Media solutions provide complete, end-to-end software and services for the Information Highway, from the back-end media server software to the front-end development tools for creating interactive, multi-media applications. The Oracle Media suite of software includes Oracle Media Server, Oracle Media Net, and Oracle Media Objects.
