Iomega will supply its Rev drive and removable disk to a subsidiary of Thomson. Thomson will build the Rev into professional audio/video devices sold to recording companies.
Introduced a year ago as a retail product, the Rev portable hard-drive cartridge stores 35 gigabytes of uncompressed data, or the capacity of 50 CD discs. The Rev is Iomega's big hope of recapturing the dominant position it once held in digital storage.
The Rev will allow video recording companies to stop relying on tape, said Tom Kampfer, an Iomega executive vice president. "The whole video industry has been plagued by the issue of tape for a very long time," Kampfer said. "The (Rev) operates by random access, while tape is linear."
Thomson's video servers using the Rev will be available starting in July, Kampfer said. They will be sold under the name of the subsidiary, Grass Valley. The video servers will be able to use Rev discs available at retail, he said, as well as higher-performance discs especially designed for the video market.