BT's video-on-demand technology trial

The author discusses BT's video-on-demand technology trial; a trial which set out to answer the technical issues surrounding the viability of a number of technologies key to the development of interactive multimedia services. The trial is based in Kesgrave, with a video server comprising an nCube parallel processing computer playing video stored on a magnetic disk store. The value of the parallel processing computer software as implemented by Oracle is in the ability of each processor to reconstruct a movie from a large number of segments distributed across the total disk array. By breaking up the movie in this way and taking advantage of the disk controllers' ability to manage a relatively small number of simultaneous disk accesses, one copy of a movie can be viewed simultaneously by many customers.