« Cisco Announces Growing with Technology Award Winners | Main | Grey's Anatomy, 24, The Office and Cisco's Human Network »
October 18, 2007
Web 2.0, Entertainment and the Network
Most people today know the role the network plays in the distributing and connecting people to information and entertainment. But what’s Cisco’s role in the “networkification of stuff” happening in the Web 2.0 movement?
That’s the question Dan Scheinman, SVP and GM of the Cisco Media Solutions Group, addressed today in his Higher Order Bits talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. (And in the process answering the #1 question we got in the hallways: “Cisco at Web 2.0?”)
Think about it: the digitization of content and access to broadband is revolutionizing how people choose to be entertained. As a result of this technical revolution, the entertainment business is evolving. Yes, Cisco is already part of this revolution with its heritage in core networking, and by connecting many consumers to entertainment through either a Linksys home router or to their flat-screen TV through a Scientific Atlanta set-top box. But the network is more than a fire-hose of content. The network can ultimately provide a Web 2.0esque entertainment experience by bridging the gap between consumers and content owners.
Think about it. The entertainment revolution to-date has been about adding capacity to our entertainment options – for example, in the US we’ve gone from a handful of broadcast TV channels, to 100s of channels on cable and satellite, social networks and your favorite shows online. At the same time, digitization of content has removed many limitations of when, where, and how we consume content. Yes, these trends have empowered us, but we are now facing an overwhelming amount of choice and content .
This new reality has created the We/Me movement. People still want to have the social experience around entertainment (the “We”). They want to want to hang around the virtual water cooler watching videos with friends, discussing their favorites, and increasingly adding their own creations to content through comments, mashups, derivative works, etc. But the proliferation of choice has also led to people demanding a more personalized entertainment experience (the “Me”) to help them deal with the volume of content. The entertainment industry is struggling to deliver the We/Me experience, and still get paid for the valuable content they create.
Right, so what’s Cisco’s and the network’s role in bridging the We/Me gap? Cisco is working on Eos, a software platform that serves as an entertainment operating system enabling consumers to have an interactive, personalized, community-based entertainment experience, WHILE simplifying the administrative experience for content owners in engaging audiences, and distributing and monetizing their content.
To sum it up: today we have silos of entertainment content. As the silos disappear, the ability to deliver an interactive, “Web 2.0” entertainment experience becomes very valuable to both consumers and content owners. Having both the distribution and connection (to both the set-top box and home network) becomes strategic in providing that next-generation experience.
Stay tuned…
Posted by Scott Brown on October 18, 2007 11:30 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.cisco.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/1185
