Hitachi, Blue Peach In Multimedia Search Deal for Digital Entertainment Devices

By Anuradha Shukla

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

The Embedded Business Group of Hitachi America, Ltd., and digital home solutions provider Blue Peach have released 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.

 

Developers using the Blue Peach Digital Media Server solution can use the Entier database to design devices that allow consumers to search for the digital entertainment content they want more naturally.

 

Blue Peach Digital Media Server is a commercial off-the-shelf platform for manufacturers of digital media devices such as digital video recorders (DVRs), digital cameras and MP3 music players. Entier will enable the developers and device manufacturers using this server to offer consumers cutting-edge content management functionality.

 

Users can leverage this functionality to personalize search by tagging, browsing, and finding the exact piece of content, the way they want, quickly and efficiently.

 

Entier also enables consumers who are using Blue Peach to network their home entertainment devices a robust and efficient way. This capability will allow them to search and gain access to music, movies and other digital files from any networked device in the home.

 

The new Blue Peach solution can incorporate Entier and its next-generation search capabilities to enable consumers to find specific files and entertainment content to suit their mood, without being constrained by vendor-defined categories such as artist or title.

 

Steven King, vice president of sales and marketing, Hitachi Embedded Business Group believes today’s digital entertainment devices put an unprecedented amount of content at consumers’ fingertips.

 

King said that storing, categorizing and finding all this content has become an increasingly complicated task especially 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,” explained King in a press relelase.

 

According to Blue Peach CTO Rich Schmitt 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,” he added.

 

Blue Peach develops software and hardware products that enable the ongoing device revolution.

 

Hitachi America, Ltd., a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., markets and manufactures a broad range of electronics, computer systems and products, and consumer electronics, and provides industrial equipment and services throughout North America.