ENRON COMMUNICATIONS ePOWERS COUNTRY MUSIC AWARDS; LIVE STREAMING WEBCAST OVER ENRON INTELLIGENT NETWORK
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, September 23, 1999
PORTLAND, Ore. - Enron Communications announced today that its Enron Intelligent Network successfully delivered the exclusive broadcast-quality webcast of live backstage interviews last night with winners of the 33rd Annual Country Music Award.
Country music fans throughout the world were able to use their PCs and Internet connections to watch interviews and press conferences conducted by the artists immediately after they were presented with their awards. The interviews were only available online at http://www.countrycool.com and were relayed across the Enron Intelligent Network (EIN) by Enron’s ePowered Media Cast technology, which provides high-quality webcasts or streams of either live or videotaped content.
“The most ringing endorsement I can offer the Enron Intelligent Network is that during our Tuesday night webcast I was checking the chat portion of our Web site, and without any prompting, a user wrote in to say, ‘Wow, this video is fantastic, and I’m on a 28.8 modem in England,’” said Chuck Aly, the producer and director of both Wednesday’s CMA Awards Webcast and Tuesday’s CMA Backstage Pass Webcast.
The interviews were taped using a regular TV camera. Enron then digitized, encoded, compressed and streamed the backstage interviews across the Enron Intelligent Network using ePowered Media Cast to various ‘Point of Presence’ (PoP) computer servers in numerous U.S. cities. ePowered Media Cast’s encoding process reduced the video from 270 megabytes per second to 300 kilobytes per second to enable viewing by standard PCs. When consumers clicked on a particular interview, Enron’s network determined which PoP server was closest to the users, and streamed the content directly to them – eliminating the switches, packets and frame relays that typically cause delays in Webcasts.
“The Enron Intelligent Network is the perfect platform for e-business, whether it’s an interview with Shania Twain or mission-critical data moving between institutions at scorching speed,” said Joe Hirko, president and CEO of Enron Communications. “ePowered Media Cast encodes and the Enron Intelligent Network transmits this content to our ePowered Internet Service Provider partners at a level of quality that no one else in the industry can achieve.”
The Enron Intelligent Network is a pure Internet Protocol platform that can transmit 1.4 trillion bits per second and enable the rapid transmission of multi-media content. The network currently has 12 local PoP servers – in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Jose and Los Angeles.
About the Enron Intelligent Network
The Enron Intelligent Network is an architecture based on a unique approach to networking through distributed servers, Enron Communications’ InterAgent® middleware and Enron Communications’ Pure IP™ technology. The intelligence of the network comes from Enron Communications’ standards-based InterAgent, a real-time intelligent messaging technology that supports the development and maintenance of distributed applications across diverse network environments. The Enron Intelligent Network brings to the global market a reliable, bandwidth-on-demand platform for delivering eCommerce solutions, data, applications and streaming rich media to the desktop. The Enron Intelligent Network allows customers to access on-the-fly capacity, tiered QoS, data, application and content capabilities purchased entirely on an as-used basis.
About ePowered Media Cast
ePowered Media Cast is Enron Communication’s first Internet based application service. ePowered Media Cast allows content providers and Webcasters the opportunity to distribute higher speed, rich media content to their Internet audience. Free, pay-per-view or subscription based distribution are all fully supported. Through an extensive distributed server architecture, Enron Communications replicates RealNetworks G2 formatted content or streams for live and on-demand playout direct to an end-user’s desktop. Both enterprise and consumer content can be delivered at bit rates from 20 kbps to 1 Mbps.
About Enron Communications, Inc.
Enron Communications (ECI) delivers the enabling platform to accelerate e-business transformation. The Enron Intelligent Network™, which is a Pure IP™ broadband overlay to the Internet. ECI also provides rich multimedia ePowered™ application service solutions that enhance online commerce and communications. The company offers ISPs and content providers a range of bandwidth transport solutions that enable businesses to scale capacity quickly to handle high traffic and high bit rate needs. A wholly owned subsidiary of Enron Corp. (NYSE:ENE), Enron Communications is located in Portland, Ore. and can be found on the web at www.enron.net.
Click here to download this press release in Microsoft Word format.
For additional information please contact:
Claudia Johnson
503-833-4435
claudia_johnson@enron.net
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