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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
SONY, INTEL TO COLLABORATE ON
GRID-BASED MUSIC DELIVERY
Sony Music Entertainment announced that it has signed a collaboration
agreement with Intel Corp that will expand Sony Music's commercial content
encoding and delivery system. This agreement will provide a wider variety of
digital content to media consumers through improved systems that support
digital media service providers.
To serve its growing service provider customer base, the Sony Music Digital
Services Group purchased Intel-based servers to ensure their upstream media
management system has the processing power and scalability to support a
quickly ramping business.
The two companies also will collaborate on Grid computing research that
could
lead to the expansion of Sony Music's encoding solution which uses the
untapped processing power of PCs and laptops in Sony's enterprise during
particularly demanding encoding jobs. Sony Music will also look at enhancing
the current system's scalability with cluster technology and Intel Itanium 2
processor-based systems for 64-bit applications. Intel and Sony Music plan to
develop a Solutions Blueprint for fault-tolerant service delivery platforms
that will enable service providers to quickly deploy new content services for
premium content with flexible licensing and user-friendly applications.
Sony Music Digital Services Group is a premier service provider of Digital
Asset Management and content distribution services. Digital Services Group
routinely provides hundreds of thousands of digital media files on a daily
basis to consumer services worldwide, servicing a variety of users for clients
ranging from mobile carriers and digital download services to manufacturing
plants. Sony's solution offers storage, management and delivery of high
resolution print-ready graphics, professional audio and HD broadcast quality
video assets. Digital Services Group services meet the needs of media
companies by providing both long-term archival solutions as well as
high-volume mission critical digital distribution services in consumer-ready
formats.
As part of the agreement, Sony Music purchased 3.20 GHz Intel Xeon
processor
blade servers to build up their Digital Asset Management system, which will
enable service providers to quickly gain access to the latest digital content,
such as ringtone master clips, games, music and video, for distribution to
their subscribers.
"Since 1999, we've been securely managing the rights, royalties, services
and
content for hundreds of thousands of song tracks," said Matt Carpenter, vice
president of Technology and Music Production for Sony Music Entertainment. "To
integrate video clips, ringtones and games in our service, we specified the
Intel-based blade servers because of their unmatched processing power and
small form factor. The Digital Services Group processes media files in every
popular format; Microsoft Windows, RealNetworks, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, AAC and
others, from the lowest acceptable cell phone resolution to high-definition
video files. We needed the flexibility and power the Intel processors
provide."
"This agreement demonstrates that Intel-based servers in modular
configurations meet the mission-critical specification that Sony Music has set
for its line-of-business systems," said Mike Fister, senior vice president of
Intel Corp. "Intel is pleased to have been selected as a key collaborator for
this vital project."
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