HITACHI EMBEDDED AND BLUE PEACH TEAM TO OFFER NEXT-GENERATION MULTIMEDIA SEARCH FOR DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT DEVICES
-- Blue Peach Digital Media Server Provides Unique and Powerful Search Powered by Hitachi’s Entier Embedded Data Manager, Gives Consumers Unprecedented Ability to Categorize, Manage and Locate Digital Entertainment Content --
SANTA CLARA, Calif., and SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. – Jan. 2, 2007 – The Embedded Business Group of Hitachi America, Ltd., a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), and digital home solutions provider Blue Peach today announced the Blue Peach NAS Digital Media Server with next generation multimedia search provided by the Hitachi Entier relational database management system (RDBMS), which delivers an application-optimized platform with unique, powerful local search capabilities and reduces code by a factor of up to 20-fold. The addition of the Entier database will provide developers using the Blue Peach Digital Media Server solution the ability to design devices that allow consumers to search for the digital entertainment content they want in a more natural manner.
Developers and device manufacturers using the Blue Peach Digital Media Server, a commercial off-the-shelf platform for manufacturers of digital media devices such as digital video recorders (DVRs), digital cameras and MP3 music players, now will be able to offer consumers cutting-edge content management functionality thanks to Entier. This functionality allows users to personalize search by tagging, browsing and finding the exact piece of content, the way they want, quickly and efficiently.
With Entier, the Blue Peach Digital Media Server solution enables consumers who are using Blue Peach to network their home entertainment devices a robust and efficient way to search and gain access to music, movies and other digital files from any networked device in the home. By incorporating Entier and its next-generation search capabilities, the new Blue Peach solution enables consumers to not only find specific files but also find entertainment content to suit their mood, without being constrained by vendor-defined categories such as artist or title.
“Today’s digital entertainment devices put an unprecedented amount of content at consumers’ fingertips,” said Steven King, vice president of sales and marketing, Hitachi Embedded Business Group. “Storing, categorizing and finding all that content, however, has become an increasingly complicated task. It is especially difficult in a media server environment such as the Blue Peach Digital Media Server, which can contain a wide variety of content and tens of thousands of individual content files. Consumers need more than generic search capabilities to find content in a manner more along the lines they think: ‘Find me pictures from my last vacation,’ “find me music with this mood for my dinner party.’ To do this, vendors need a fully functional database management system to host the data, accompanied by the new advanced search features supplied by Entier to quickly and efficiently manage and find their music, pictures, video and other content in a more personalized and powerful way.”
Blue Peach CTO Rich Schmitt said: “Managing digital content in the home is a new challenge that requires a new, high-powered solution. The digital home will be more like a traditional business enterprise. Data availability, reliability and scalability are required. The Entier solution allows us to achieve these goals within an embedded environment more effectively, as it reduces development code by up to 20 fold in the key areas around search and data management. Blue Peach’s networked digital home solutions allow manufacturers to make it easier than ever for consumers to manage and enjoy their digital content whenever they want, on any networked device. The Hitachi Entier embedded database is uniquely suited to this task.”
The Blue Peach Digital Media Server allows for the centralized storage, aggregation and categorization of digital content. Consumers can use the Digital Media Server to network all their digital media players (DVRs, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc.) and personal computers, allowing content to be searched, browsed and played on any networked device in the home. The Blue Peach Digital Media Server offers standards-based interoperability with video, audio and photo players, and can be integrated with Blue Peach’s network-attached storage and RAID software, and integrated with leading commercial Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) and proprietary kernels.
The Entier embedded database management system is based on the technology that makes Hitachi’s HiRDB one of the top-selling RDBMS products in Japan. Entier is designed for small footprint consumer devices that require a fast, powerful standards-based database manager. While a typical RDBMS provides simple search of data, Entier offers two powerful application-optimized search technologies that make a device easier to use, more responsive, while at the same time dramatically reducing the amount of code an embedded application developer needs to write.
The first of these application optimizations provides the ability to search multidimensional, or “3D,” data. This means that an Entier-enabled device can conduct a spatial, or multidimensional, search using the SQL language. By searching a variety of qualitative tags defined by the consumer, Entier can search for content that has qualities similar to other files – for example, finding music of a certain tempo or a movie not too scary for young children. Secondly, Entier offers incremental text search, which progressively executes the search, narrowing down the results with each keystroke. This is useful for any application that involves searching for specific entries by name, such as song or movie titles.
The Hitachi Embedded Business Group will be exhibiting with Mentor Graphics at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas beginning Jan. 8, 2007, at the Sands Convention Center, booth 72156.