May 8, 2007 Turning the television model on its head, Video On Demand (VOD) is developing into a serious competitor for broadcast and cable TV programming. Leaving aside the vast television content piracy "industry," established TV companies are looking at how to capitalise on developing technology that allows users to pick and choose what they watch and exactly when. As storage and streaming solutions improve, the ability to get home and turn on the 6 o'clock news at 6:45 gets closer to a reality.

As a major player in pushing technology forward in the VOD industry, SeaChange is unveiling two new products at The Cable Show over the next couple of days. Axiom Core 4.0 is the latest version of the company's proven VOD network, content and subscriber management software. MediaServer Flash Streamer is the first VOD content serving medium to eliminate volatile media such as spinning discs.

Axiom Core 4.0 Axiom is the world's most widely deployed VOD management system. The open software suite was developed to cover every aspect of subscriber management, content management, support and delivery, operations support (including extensive performance monitoring and reporting), and business decision support (conveying historical data in support of new businesses including dynamic ad insertion).

Axiom Core 4.0 includes the following enhancements:

- Support for up to 10 million subscribers at a single site today and 20 aggregate sites, moving to 50 aggregate sites by year end - Faster content refresh – up to 6,800 hours per month, per site - Optimized content propagation across both memory and disk servers - New graphical management tools for network and content administration - Support for third-party System Resource Managers - Support for Cisco, Concurrent and Motorola servers

Open APIs and complete SDKs, based on IT and television standards like XML, HTTP and SOAP, simplify integration with a wide range of third-party client applications.

MediaServer Flash Streamer SeaChange's new flash memory solution is the first on-demand media streaming solution to eliminate the use of volatile media such as spinning discs, which make it difficult to stream to multiple users while some are fast-forwarding or rewinding. The MediaServer allows networks to keep a single centralised content library while pushing on-demand content out to subscribers through a fast, reliable and long-life Flash intermediary.

The system uses Seachange's MediaCluster server architecture to balance loads across all Flash modules, ensuring reliable performance and easy scalability while also extending the life of the individual Flash modules.

Both products will be demonstrated at The Cable Show over the next few days in Las Vegas.