By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

In my last post, I talked about how companion screens are changing the TV landscape. It’s easy to see how our ever-present smartphones and iPads can alter the TV viewing experience. (“I’m sorry dear, could you repeat that? I was checking my Twitter feed and responding to this IM, and I couldn’t hear you over the intro to Mad Men.”)

But what are people really doing on those companion devices? According to a white paper published last year by Yahoo! and the The Nielsen Company, nearly a quarter of them are looking up something related to what they’re watching on TV.

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Tags: mobile, Pay TV, Service Provider, smartphone, tablet, user experience, videoscape

By now, I have seen about a dozen CES wrap ups, the first of which, ironically, came after just the first day.  Ultrabooks, lack of iPad killer, and the iPhone5 rumor mill seemed to dominate the discussion.  My experience after the last week in Las Vegas was “beyond the devices” and admittedly beyond the hype.  Over four days, Cisco held nearly 500 customer, press and analyst meetings, and after very extensive research (read:  polling a few of my teammates in the ever lengthy elevator lines), here is my top takeaways from CES 2012:

• Show:  CES is now the single largest service provider show in North America.  There are a few others, but in terms of customer engagement, this is the biggest.  From Europe to Asia, South America and Australia, an incredible array of SPs are there.  Forget the show’s name Read More »

Tags: CES, Cisco, consumer electronic show, devices, mobility, video, videoscape

Marthin De Beer, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Video and Collaboration Group takes time at CES to share his thoughts on the service provider video market. He highlights Cisco’s video experience demos at the show, and discusses how we are helping customers through our end-to-end architecture, with strategies to bridge legacy infrastructure to future IP-centric architectures, including the emergence of home gateways. Read More »

Tags: CES, Cisco, consumer electronic show, Service Provider, video, videoscape

Today we’re glad to shine the spotlight on our colleagues at Numericable, for taking such a comprehensive step forward in making multi-screen television available to its wide-reaching residential footprint in France.

Specifically, Numericable is deploying our  (3G60) Broadband Processing Engine, a high-density CMTS and uBR10k line card used for DOCSIS 3.0, wideband connectivity, as well as several components in our Videoscape TV family – meaning our CDS (Content Delivery System), for adapting multiple content types to different screen sizes; our Media Processor and Transcode Manager, for adaptive bit rate streaming; and our UCS and Nexus family of data center switches.

The plan augments Numericable’s existing work on its “fiber to the basement” initiative, which can offer up to 4 Gbps of capacity over fiber and coax. Read More »

Tags: 3G60, Cisco, docsis, Numericable, Service Provider, Video On Demand, videoscape

Cisco’s comprehensive TV platform, Videoscape, brings new exciting entertainment experiences for consumers and new revenue streams for Service Providers with new ‘video in the cloud’ services.  Today at CES, Cisco is launching several new Videoscape products and announcing how major service providers including Rogers Communications of Canada, YES of Israel and Numéricable of France, have selected Videoscape to deliver their next generation video services.

These new Videoscape products power ‘video in the cloud’ experiences by bringing live and on demand video together, offering a consistent look and feel across devices whether its a PC, MAC, iPad, iPhone or Android device.  Videoscape is leading Service Providers through the migration, with a unique open software platform, providing a path to an all IP-based video infrastructure.  Service Providers can now provide their consumers the ability to move, pause and resume video content on any device, following them whenever they go.

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Tags: Any Screen TV, CES, cloud, IP-based video, Numericable, Rogers, tv anywhere, video in the cloud, videoscape, YES