Cisco Reinventing TV?
CES 2011 brought us many innovations; one of them is the Cisco Videoscape – A “service provider solution” for the future of the TV.
Cisco Videoscape is a delivery platform for service providers and a set-top box/media gateway for the consumers.
Cisco hopes to attract service providers with both hardware/software solutions:
Videoscape Media Suite and the Cisco Conductor for Videoscape and the consumer solutions: The Videoscape media gateway, Videoscape IP set-top box and Videscape software clients.
The goal is to unify video consumption at home – making it simple and accessible. At the heart of the system is the media gateway – it will function as a routing and multimedia device and allow the consumer to watch Video and Web content on any connected network device (TV, PC, mobile device). TV connectivity will be done with the set-top box, and Videoscape will also support Umi – Cisco’s Home Telepresence system.
When it comes to set-top IPTV boxes, it seems that Cisco is entering quite a crowded market – However its sheer marketing power and a complete product range might just do the trick.
But what makes it differ from current offerings by competitors (Google TV for example)?
1) It’s a complete platform (Media gateway AND a TV set-top box).
2) Unlike Google, Cisco is aiming for the ISPs – and maybe, unlike Google, they are more of a pipe rather than a potential threat to the Service/Content Providers themselves.
It’s pretty obvious that the key to the success of Videscape is the business benefits it will bring the service providers – Cisco talks about targeted ads, currently not available with today’s TV broadcasts.
By placing interactive web content next to TV streams and targeting specific audience Videoscape can help bring additional benefits to the current market.
As service providers relay on the “old” TV model and traditional media advertising - Videoscape success depends somehow on the decline of the traditional TV business, and that might take some time.
It seems that the latest batch of Cisco products are driven by a long term strategy, as the increased traffic by video products can also boost networking products - a major market for Cisco.
Increased adoption of video-centric consumer devices will boost online traffic, Cisco estimates that Global IP traffic will quadruple from 2009 to 2014 – and Video playing a major part in it.
Videoscape joins the lines of Cisco Umi and the recently acquired Flip cameras for yet an additional move into the home-video market.
While “reinventing TV” seems like a bold statement, things does look interesting for Cisco and the IPTV market as a whole.
