Arroyo OnDemand

Arroyo OnDemand is Field Deployed or in Trials with Three of the Top North American Cable Operators

Pleasanton, CA - January 10, 2005 - Arroyo Video Solutions, Inc., developer of a unique Video Platform enabling operators to deliver advanced video applications, unveiled today for the first time details of its initial application, Arroyo OnDemand, a groundbreaking Video On Demand (VOD) solution. Shipping since October 2004, Arroyo OnDemand has rapidly gained momentum and is already enabling real world commercial deployments or is in trial with three of the top ten North American cable operators.

Arroyo OnDemand enables VOD services with industry leading density and scalability, improving operational performance ten-fold over other leading video services companies today. This unrivaled achievement is made possible by a radically new, network centric, open VOD architecture that uses totally open, industry standard Intel Xeon servers, with performance optimized by Arroyo's unique Video Accelerator technology.

This headend-based architecture delivers tremendous manageability and flexibility in the implementation of either centralized or distributed VOD infrastructures, with 100% reliability that allows VOD delivery 24x7. Its standard-based hardware and operational software also guarantees a constant stream of performance enhancements and new options, freeing video operators from obsolescence and the fork-lift upgrades they have been facing so far with the existing proprietary solutions.

"Bitter experience has taught cable operators that buying proprietary hardware platforms guarantees future problems," said Nick Hamilton-Piercy, Senior Technology Advisor, Rogers Cable and Technical Advisory Board Member for Arroyo. "The Arroyo solution delivers performance and scalability exceeding any proprietary platform, yet is a completely open solution. This combination is obviously extremely attractive to MSOs."

Arroyo will be demonstrating Arroyo OnDemand from January 11th to 13th during SCTE's Emerging Technologies Conference in Huntington Beach, CA. Please contact Arroyo at et2005@arroyo.tv to schedule a demonstration.

Arroyo OnDemand Architecture, Performance and Scalability

Arroyo OnDemand separates storage and streaming into separate industry standard Xeon servers and employs Arroyo Video Accelerator technology to optimize the performance of each server. Each Stream server supports up to 3,000 personalized 3.75Mbps streams in just 3 rack-units (RU) of space, which translates into an unrivaled streaming performance of up to 42,000 streams per rack. And each 4 RU Vault server simultaneously ingests up to 160 channels of live TV and stores up to 9.6Tbytes of video content, easily supporting applications such as broadcast on demand and nPVR.

Content and streaming are easily scaled by adding additional industry standard servers to create Vault groups and Stream groups, each of which operates as a single "virtual" Vault server or Stream server. Vaults and Streamers communicate using inexpensive, standard Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), enabling both centralized solutions where the Vault and Stream groups are at one location, and decentralized deployments where Streamers are distributed across the Metro Area. This degree of flexibility is unique to Arroyo OnDemand and enables Arroyo OnDemand to cost effectively support both very extensive VOD libraries and very large stream counts without requiring either many content replicas or enormous amounts of streaming bandwidth across the Metro.

The Arroyo OnDemand architecture can therefore be tuned to support a wide range of on demand services by varying the mix of Vault servers and Stream servers deployed. This flexibility is in sharp contrast to proprietary systems which involve hardware specifically engineered to support a particular service - movies on demand, TV on demand or others.

Resiliency is also delivered in a simple and foolproof way. Based on multiple smaller servers grouped together and acting as one, any individual group member can fail without impacting the group overall. This separates Arroyo OnDemand from architectures based on single, large, proprietary streamers, which are single points of failure and require expensive, complex, failure-prone over-engineering to partially compensate for the basic architectural flaw.

The Arroyo OnDemand architecture makes the common operational challenges of upgrade, expansion and maintenance a snap. In addition, Arroyo OnDemand includes the Arroyo SystemManager, a web-based central management tool designed to configure, monitor and report on a large VOD network.