Sun Fire servers to power AT&T U-Verse IPTV

by Kathryn Lang

Sun Microsystems have announced that AT&T has chosen their Sun Fire servers to power the U-Verse IPTV service.

The announcement is significant for Sun, as their Sun Fire servers form part of their Sun Streaming System, which could potentially be used to stream 160,000 simultaneous IP video channels onto a network.

While AT&T has not yet announced using the whole Sun Streaming System package, the implementation of the Sun Fire server technology will certainly give them a chance to test the theoretical scalability of the basic technology.

U-verse itself is a series of IPTV channels distributed via multicast, allowing a single stream to be sent to any number of users. U-verse uses H.264 (MPEG-4) encoding, which compresses video better than MPEG-2, meaning less bandwidth is required for a given level of video quality

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