Streaming Video For Fina nce Industry

Compaq and Starlight form partnership on video and multimedia servers

By Justin Hibbard

tarlight Networks Inc. and Compaq Computer will launch a partnership this week to sell streaming-video software and compatible hardware to financial-services companies. London investment bank Paribas and Electronic Trading Group LLC in New York are among the latest financial firms to use Starlight's streaming-video software.

Starlight and Compaq will make sure their products work together out of the box, says Tanya Candia, VP of marketing at Starlight, in Mountain View, Calif. Also, Starlight's Rapid Media services group will offer customers its expertise in deploying the products. Compaq's financial services group will sell multimedia servers to the financial- services industry through Compaq's channel partners.

The partnership will give Starlight's products an advantage similar to that held by all-in-one packages from vendors such as Silicon Graphics Inc., says Jae Kim, an analyst at Paul Kagan Associates in Carmel, Calif.

Starlight's multimedia server software focuses on high performance. Its StarCast server streams live video in MPEG-1 format at rates from 128 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps. StarCast uses the IP Multicast protocol on Ethernet, ATM, or FDDI networks. Starlight's StarWorks server streams stored video in formats such as Motion JPEG at rates as high as 8 Mbps.

Paribas rolled out StarCast last month to 500 traders at its new trading facility in London, which has an ATM backbone that pumps 155 Mbps to the desktop. Rupert Brown, a member of the Global Technical Architecture team at Paribas, says the traders will receive live broadcasts from CNN, CNBC, and the BBC-sources they rely on for trading deci sions.

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