Microsoft® NetShow™ Theater delivers stunning, high-quality multimedia to hundreds of clients anytime, anywhere your network reaches. Microsoft NetShow Theater Server enables interactive multimedia applications that take advantage of dial-up and local area networks ranging in bandwidth from 14.4 Kbps to multi-megabits per second.
NetShow Theater Server has the power and flexibility to meet any demand for interactive applications on public and private networks and in residential cable networks or telephone systems where high-bandwidth networks are available. It provides the ideal multimedia platform for developing custom solutions when rich video and audio content are called for.
Until now, multimedia solutions required proprietary supercomputers, special hardware for effective fault tolerance, and massive memory to store only a few hours of content. Microsoft NetShow Theater Server solves these challenges efficiently and cost-effectively using off-the-shelf PC technology. NetShow Theater Server streams full-screen MPEG video to PC clients using a distributed, fault-tolerant architecture that makes it ideal for mission-critical applications where scalability is important.
Designed for use on dedicated high-bandwidth networks, NetShow Theater Server is the perfect complement to Microsoft NetShow's standard capabilities, which provide live multicasting of audio and video, streaming audio and video, and illustrated audio (audio synchronized with images) in low- to mid-bandwidth applications such as dial-up Internet connections and shared LANs. Used together or independently over the same network, the NetShow family of products delivers a flexible, powerful multimedia solution.
The conceptual diagram shows the flow of video content through a typical NetShow Theater Server installation.
Video content is captured offline by cameras, recorders, or other sources such as laser discs or satellite transmission.Video is digitally encoded in MPEG format at the desired bit rate, and then translated into a proprietary Microsoft format for loading onto the content servers. The video is distributed, or striped, across all content servers to achieve guaranteed performance for all viewers. A single title can be viewed simultaneously by any number of users with no loss of quality or responsiveness.
Each content server runs the Windows NT® operating system and has a number of disk drives dedicated to storing the encoded video data. As your organization expands or your user needs grow, additional disk drives and servers can be added to increase capacity and bandwidth. Thousands of individual titles of arbitrary length can be stored.
Content servers are managed by the NetShow title server, which controls and synchronizes the entire system. The title server receives requests from users and forwards the requests to the appropriate content servers to play videos.
Video content is streamed to users over a high-bandwidth IP network, using either Switched Ethernet or ATM.
Users may view full-motion video in full-screen mode, or as a smaller window within a Web browser or other application on a PC running Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT. The NetShow player can play streams from NetShow Theater Server. NetShow Player is an ActiveXTM control that includes familiar VCR-like controls for play, stop, pause, fast forward, and fast rewind. A full-featured, stand-alone player is also included for those that do not want to create their own user interface.
Microsoft, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Windows, and Windows NT are registered trademarks and NetShow, ActiveX, and BackOffice are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Other products and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.