By Leszek Izdebski, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG)

The past few years have brought sweeping transformation to television—a trend that will only accelerate in the coming decade. Following up on a 2011 study on the future of television, Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) recently examined the ways disruptive technology and user behavior trends are impacting TV advertising. We identified four major trends that will transform advertising and the viewer experience.

1. Channels Will Go Away

While we do not believe that all future distribution will be through on-demand unicast technologies, consumers will not think about “channels” as the means of accessing programming. Adoption of video on demand, Intelligent Programming Guides and personal video recorders (PVRs) is shifting viewing from linear broadcasts on a TV screen to a multiscreen, multi-device, multi-modal, on-my-schedule, user-controlled experience. Brands and networks will no longer be able to ensure that ads placed in specific episodes will have sufficient audience reach. This behavioral shift will force advertisers to focus on new forms of addressable advertising: Read More »

Tags: 3D printers, ad buying, advertising, branded entertainment, channels, Cisco, haptics, IBSG, interactive, marketing, multiscreen, on-demand, Personalization, product placement, Service Provider, targeted, television, user involvement, video

We are excited to announce that ActionPacked! Networks successfully completed interoperability verification and testing of LiveAction for the MSI management CDN program. This makes them the first management partner to support the MSI’s REST-based management interface (v3.1). This support gives LiveAction the ability to monitor and troubleshoot issues on any MSI enabled endpoint. LiveAction supports both certificate-based and username/password based authentication to MSI-enabled endpoints.

LiveAction is also a Medianet Systems Management CDN partner supporting Medianet capabilities on the network elements. With their current enhancements to support the MSI management interface, LiveAction becomes one of the first products to support Medianet capabilities on endpoints as well as the network.

This successful IVT also underlines the fact that Medianet is based on open standards and was designed from the start to be an open, interoperable architecture.

A few additional highlights on LiveAction:

Read More »

Tags: ActionPacked, business video, Cisco Developer Network, enterprise networks, IVT, media services interface, medianet, MSI, video

The future of television may well include holographic, multisensory experiences worthy of science fiction. But many other visionary predictions are closer to the horizon, if not already upon us. These are creating exciting opportunities, while forcing all players in the television value chain to adapt quickly.

Recently, I met via Cisco^® TelePresence^® with more than 50 journalists from 11 countries—all in Central and Eastern Europe—to discuss the future of television and its impact on these mostly emerging markets. I participated with two of my colleagues: Kate Griffin, from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) service provider practice; and Guillaume de Saint Marc, from Cisco’s service provider video technology group (SPVTG). The roundtable took place over two days and used a Cisco IBSG study, “The Future of Television: Sweeping Change at Breakneck Speed,” as a springboard for discussions that were lively and free-spirited. Read More »

Tags: advertising, Central Europe, Cisco, cloud, Eastern Europe, Emerging Markets, Fresco, future, IBSG, immersive, interactive, multiscreen, personalized, Service Provider, targeted, television, video, videoscape unity

A belated Happy New Year from Cisco Live London 2013! This is our last year in London, and it was an excellent sendoff bringing the latest for medianet to our great partners and customers in the European market. With the greater adoption of medianet technologies, we saw the incorporation of medianet features within the general design sessions related to Jabber deployment, to Access Switching, WAN Network Designs [1] and even a few Management [2][3] sessions. (Some of the session links provide a video capture of the session as well as a download of the content)

Meanwhile, the event brought an introduction to Medianet Flow Metadata [4] as well as Media Services Proxy [5], which allows the sharing of attributes of flows with the network. The network can then use these attributes for advanced classification, for example, to match the audio leg of a Jabber for Windows session. We had a demo station setup where we showed the quality of metadata-based classification of Jabber video compared to other forms of video that did not benefit from advanced classification. Of course, there were a number of other demo stations showing the network management utilization of medianet features for monitoring and reporting on network performance, namely Performance Monitor [6] and Mediatrace [7].

Read More »

Tags: Cisco Live London, collaboration, medianet, rich media applications, video

As we start the year, Cisco’s CTO for Australia & New Zealand, Kevin Bloch, shares his thoughts on the trends that are going to shape the networking industry in 2013.

1. “Mobile .. for business” – New directly connected customer channel

Organisations will make significant investments to directly connect and interact with external and internal customers via their mobile devices, as nearly everyone has at least one.

2. “Cloud .. for business” – Big hit on ICT industry

Organisations ‘get’ cloud in 2013 and reorganise (transform) around “as-a-service”. As this happens, IT becomes an operational expense and risk shifts to the provider. This will be a journey and ‘hybrid clouds’ will dominate in 2013. Everyone in the ICT industry will need to adjust.

3. “Analytics .. for (big) business” -- Big Data gets bigger

Businesses actually don’t want IT -- they want to achieve their business goals! However, in order to do so, they need to be able to make fast, smart decisions. The data is available (actually exploding, particularly from smart mobile devices) and technology is now able to make that data useful (“data is the new oil”).

4. “Security .. for business” – IT’s risky

With increased mobile adoption, proliferation of intelligent devices, connectivity and clouds, organisations will increase attention on the means to address vulnerability and business risk. Attacks will focus on the most popular clients – mobile Android devices.

5. “Video .. for business” – More places to see

Video is increasingly permeating business. As mobile devices now exceed desktops, video becomes more accessible, from more places, from more devices.

Read More »

Tags: cloud, mobile, video