Exabyte Enters New Vertical Market: Video Broadcasting Technology

BOULDER, Colo., Sept. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Exabyte Corp. (Nasdaq: EXBT) today announced its entrance into a vertical market new for the company: video broadcasting technology. The company said that its Exabyte 480 8mm Tape Library with Mammoth has been selected by Tektronix, Inc. as the core unit for the Tektronix Profile PLS200 Library System. Designed for use by television broadcasters, the Profile PLS200 Library System is a high-capacity storage, retrieval and data management unit for digital video commercial and news spots.
The Profile PLS200 Library System was unveiled today by Tektronix at the International Broadcasters Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and will be on display there until Sept. 16, 1996. The product is expected to ship to Tektronix customers before year end. It is designed to work in conjunction with Tektronix's Profile Professional Disk Recorder and Profile Library System Software.
The Exabyte 480 8mm Tape Library combines up to four new-generation Exabyte Mammoth 8mm tape drives, 80 EXATAPE data cartridges and advanced robotics in a space-saving enclosure roughly the size of a mini-refrigerator.
The 480 can store up to 1.6 terabytes of data in native mode at an aggregate transfer rate of 12 megabytes per second. (Applications that involve the storage of data other than compressed video can make use of built-in hardware compression and on average double these amounts.) The unit's robotics provide complete automation of data storage and retrieval functions.
The Exabyte 480 was selected by Tektronix for the Profile PLS200 Library System for a number of reasons. With its extremely high capacity, the 480 can store nearly 5,000 commercials, or over 100 hours of digital video data. Fast data transfer provides access to any file in less than three minutes. Multiple tape drives enable the simultaneous transfer of up to four video
clips. The 480's automation, combined with a unique tape partitioning feature of the Mammoth 8mm tape drives, heightens the ability to manage a large collection of digital video spots. Finally, a small physical footprint and a low per-megabyte storage cost make the Exabyte 480 with Mammoth a highly economical mass storage solution.
"Due to its high capacity, speed and cost-effectiveness, the Exabyte 480 8mm Tape Library is an ideal storage and archival choice for our broadcast television customers," said Ray Baldock, Tektronix's director of product marketing for the Video and Networking Division.
"We're very pleased that Tektronix has selected the 480 as the unit for the Profile PLS200 Library System," said Peter D. Behrendt, Exabyte's chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer. "It demonstrates that, with the significant technological advances made by our Mammoth 8mm technology, Exabyte products can fit into a broader range of environments and appeal to an even larger group of end users."
The Mammoth technology Behrendt referred to applies to Exabyte's new line of 8mm tape drives and automated tape libraries, which offers six times the performance, three times the capacity and half the per-megabyte cost of the previous generation of Exabyte products.
Tektronix, Inc. is a portfolio of measurement, color printing, and video and networking businesses dedicated to applying technology excellence to customer challenges. Tektronix is headquartered in Wilsonville, Ore., and has operations in 23 countries outside the U.S. Founded in 1946, the company had revenues of $1.8 billion in fiscal 1996 and is celebrating its 50th
anniversary this year.
Headquartered in Boulder, Colo., Exabyte Corp. designs, manufactures and markets a full range of tape storage products: 8mm and minicartridge tape drives, 8mm and 4mm tape libraries, and recording media. Exabyte is the world's largest independent manufacturer focused solely on tape storage products, which it markets through OEMs, distributors and resellers.

NOTE: Exabyte is a registered trademark and EXATAPE is a trademark of Exabyte Corp. All other trade names referenced are property of their respective owners.