TAMPA, Fla. -- On-demand television is evolving rapidly with a wider variety of content and new time-shifted services. In support of this trend and on-demand deployments worldwide, SeaChange International (Nasdaq: SEAC - News) debuts its add-on Memory Streaming Blade this week at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' Conference on Emerging Technologies 2006.

"We've prepared our customers for the next generation of on-demand television as they bring in prime-time programs, fulfill more niche preferences and launch compelling new capabilities such as pausing live network shows," said Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president, corporate strategy, SeaChange. "This 'long tail' of on-demand content is stretching further out, while the hot material and new applications are pushing streaming requirements further. Our new blade turns deployed SeaChange servers into hybrid servers, optimizing disk and memory to scale streaming capacity, as needed, without adding storage."

SeaChange Blades: Building blocks for the "Long Tail"

The SeaChange Memory Blade is the latest building block in SeaChange's strategy to help television operators gain the advantages of a mix memory and disk resources - adding streams, storage and ingest independently, in convenient increments to new or previously deployed VOD Systems without adding servers. The blade's advantages are realized by SeaChange's Axiom video operation system software, which dynamically manages the lifespan of content, including real-time capture from broadcast and other sources. Combined with the unsurpassed economy and fault-resilience of SeaChange's widely-deployed and patented MediaCluster® architecture, the Memory Blade supports the most reliable and cost-efficient means of delivering the escalating long tail of on-demand television content.

The SeaChange Memory Streaming Blade caches on-demand's most popular content in on-board memory so that nearly 1,000 streams per blade can be served without impacting a server's disk performance. With four GigE ports and 3.7Gbps throughput, a Memory Streaming Blade allows operators to scale inexpensively.

Announced separately, the SeaChange Ingest Blade eliminates the network bottleneck that restricts ingest capacity, adding up to 100Mbps of ingest capacity to existing servers. Ingest blades provide a dramatic improvement in ingest capacity at a low cost to meet the needs of new and demanding applications like time-shifted television and network PVR.

With these seamless blade additions, even the smallest server can record more than 50 channels simultaneously and deliver thousands of on-demand streams to subscribers, scaling to hundreds of simultaneous ingest channels and tens of thousands of on-demand streams in the patented MediaCluster® architecture.

SeaChange International Inc. (Nasdaq: SEAC)