Icast Communications to Deliver Video to PCs

Icast Communications Inc., a start-up founded by one of the pioneers of IP multicasting, is set to announce tomorrow multicast software products that will enable video, audio and high-volume data transfers over an intranet or the Internet, according to sources close to the company.

Icast's wares will join a growing field of products supporting IP multicast, a technology designed to give IS and network managers greater control over the potentially thorny task of disseminating complex, time-sensitive data. The announcements from the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company precede an expected flood of IP multicast rollouts slated to be announced next month at the Networld + Interop show in Las Vegas, where the t echnology will also be used to transmit show-related television programs over the Internet.

While such demonstrations may be eye catching, the question of a broad role for multicast technology in the enterprise has yet to be definitively answered. High implementation costs and infrastructure questions have typically restricted its use for videoconferencing or long distance training applications among small pockets of users inside corporations.

But the promise of greater bandwidth control and user identification--two key features of IP multicast--should make it more attractive to IS and network managers than push technology products, which use a lot of bandwidth and do not allow for discrete control of where information is broadcast. In anticipation of this trend, vendors across the industry, from Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics Inc. to Cisco and Microsoft have been quietly adding support for IP multicast to their workstations, routers and operating systems.

Pricing for Icast's software is ex pected to hit near the low end of the current multicast market scale, with client pricing below $100 per seat on volume purchases, and server pricing around $2,000 per copy.

One of the first applications to support multicast to the desktop is Precept Software's IP/TV product--shipping for about a year--which costs $195 for the client and $1,995 for the server. In addition, the program guide to available broadcasts costs $995.

Yet for some users, such costs are justified.

Using Precept's IP/TV, "we can go out to over 20 offices in the field, as well as the local office," in San Jose, said John Hara, program manager with the applied technology group of Cisco's worldwide training department. Cisco has an undisclosed equity investment in Precept.

Hara said that the applications, which augment distance-learning programs in place at the company are,"easy to justify," because they can eliminate travel expenses. And more applications that can take advantage of multicast are on the way.

"Mission-c ritical data is going to become real-time enabled, and the way it will happen is via IP multicast," said David Pool, CEO of DataChannel Corp., Bellevue, Wash. DataChannel recently signed a deal with multicast vendor Tibco Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., to provide a "channel" interface to Tibco's IP multicast applications, which were originally targeted at the financial services community.

Icast's technology team is led by co-founder and president Vinay Kumar, a multicast pioneer and the author of the book "MBone Interactive Multimedia on the Internet." Icast's CEO and co-founder is Enzo Torresi, who most recently was a co-founder at both Power Computing Corp. and NetFrame.

The company's server software will run on Unix and Microsoft Windows NT servers, according to sources who have seen demonstrations of the technology. Icast is also reportedly in talks with Netscape Communications to integrate its client-side package with Netscape's forthcoming Communicator product, a move that analysts said could help bri ng multicast to the masses.

"There's a number of things Netscape could do with multicast," said Fred McClimans, CEO of Ashburn, Va.-based CurrentAnalysis. "Multicast is becoming very important in most segments of the marketplace. You see the network hardware and routing functions delving deep into multicast."

Precept and other vendors already offer a plug-in version of their multicast software. But Duane Fields, a Communicator product manager at Netscape, said the company has, "no specific plans or partnerships," on the multicast front at this point.

Vendors such as Precept, Intel, StarBurst Communications and Starlight Networks deliver multicasts to the desktop without costly hardware upgrades, a path that Icast will also follow.

Also, Intel's ProShare Presenter software--optimized for videoconferencing--permits users to receive desktop multicasts, but amortizes out to about $100 per user for each of 300 seats. The transmission must originate from a Pentium PC, and Intel's ProShare Video Syst em and separate client and server pieces are also required.

Based in Concord, Mass., StarBurst's multicast product costs $8,000 for a 10-client Microsoft Windows NT server and $10,000 for a 10-client Sun Solaris server. And Starlight, Mountain View, Calif., prices its StarCast Viewer starting at $149 for each client, with another $1,495 for its Multicaster piece and $995 for the Recaster component.