Sun Microsystems is promoting a variety of video management, data management, and content distribution tools at NAB, as well as several partner initiatives, such is designing a powerful render farm solution for an indie CG film called Barnyard and a storage solution for several HBO shows. But the over-riding theme behind all this, according to Rob Glidden, the company’s marketing manager for broadband and digital media, is the notion that standardized IP/IT infrastructure solutions, built on a Java backbone, can work at a foundational level for a wide range of entertainment industry content creation, management, and distribution requirements in the strange, growing world of “new media.”

Glidden suggests that content creators should be concentrating on building a single, robust IT-based infrastructure to whip out content ranging from high-end feature films to cell-phone video, and everything in between.

“I call it the marriage of IT/IP and entertainment—this idea that there is a better way to build media workflows,” he says. “Use the same file system and throughput and architecture, the same system for a render farm or a playout system. We are encouraging the building of one, core IT platform for all these applications, since more and more companies are entering new arenas for their content.”

In this sense, he suggests, Sun’s initiatives in the Blu-ray disc world, the cable and set-top box world, the video game development world, the new world of IPTV content creation, and the world of digital asset management, among others, are all inexorably linked together.

“With Java and an IT/IP philosophy, [all these markets] are meaningful and related for us,” Glidden adds.