Napster, IBM unveil new music delivery system

Online music service Napster on Wednesday unveiled an application using IBM technology to help universities and other customers save computing bandwidth and money.

Napster, owned by digital media company Roxio Inc., said its new "Super Peer" application uses International Business Machine Corp.'s eServer BladeCenter systems to store popular songs from Napster in on-site servers rather than from the Internet.

The most popular tracks in the Napster system are stored locally, enabling customers like The University of Rochester and Penn State University, to reduce their computing infrastructure's vulnerability to overuse.

"When we embarked on our industry-leading university program, we set out to alleviate the technical and business strains that illegal file-sharing puts on Universities and ISPs," said Bill Pence, Napster's chief technology officer.

Pence said Napster daily usage at Penn State for instance totals about 100,000 downloads and 100,000 streams.

With the new application, about 90 percent of these downloads and streams would not result in traffic across the open Internet, saving the university an estimated $50,000 in bandwidth fees in the first year.

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"Helping customers securely and easily access authorized digital content is paramount to the future of the media and entertainment industry," said Steve Canepa, vice president, IBM Global Media and Entertainment Industry.

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Warren Hart, vice president of digital media solutions for IBM, said that IBM was focusing largely on digital media.

"We're working with a number of leaders globally in this space. This whole area of how to take rich media and use it for real business value is very critical for us," he said.