The new EDGE portable media player shares ‘atomic elements’ with its embedded cousin
APEX News | [3-15-11] — Brea, CA | The IMS Company‘s new seat-centric RAVE™ IFE system was inspired, in part, by the success of its portables program, CEO and founder Joseph Renton told APEXnews. But when the company decided to migrate its portables program from a COTS repurposed product to a purpose-built product, RAVE returned the favor. " One of the things that our portables customers have told us repeatedly over the years is that our portable media players are more reliable than embedded systems ", said Renton. " When comparing all of the single points of failure that can bring down an entire network, or large blocks of seats, to the relative independence of a self-contained portable device, the portable was hands-down more reliable.
" This caused us to consider whether it made sense to emulate the redundancies indigenous to a set of portables in a networked system ", said Renton. " So we decided to give every seat display unit (SDU) in an embedded system that same redundancy — every SDU would store its own content files, applications, and playback capability to so that there the single-point-of-failure scenario was eliminated. It worked. "
For years, IMS‘ portables were repurposed from consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) devices to save in development and manufacturing costs. But as tablet technology began to make COTS increasingly difficult to adapt to the IFE environment, IMS determined to migrate into purpose-built portables.
But how would they replace the cost-savings they once enjoyed from COTS? " We looked to RAVE, " said Renton. Since RAVE‘s SDUs were designed to emulate the characteristics of portables, it was relatively easy to utilize atomic components across both products—common hardware, common GUIs, and common maintenance and repair processes and facilities. In addition, both the SDUs and PMPs use SD cards secure digital storage.
" Our RAVE embedded system and new EDGE portable media players are genuinely a product line,‘ said Renton. We believe that we‘re the only company offering a product line with both embedded and portables solutions."