A few months ago at Cisco Live in San Diego, I outlined Cisco’s strategy for networked video across service provider, enterprise, and consumer networks. I talked about changes in enterprise user adoption, the future of television, and how these markets will come together over time. We are in the midst of a major market transition and the way we consume video today will soon be a thing of the past. Take a look at my Cisco Live Video and Collaboration keynote and allow me to make a point here. This is the way we are used to experiencing video – in a linear fashion from beginning to end. I believe watching video in this manner provides an insufficient experience and will soon be as antiquated as watching a black and white film is today.
Experience matters. Capturing video for future reference and viewing in a linear fashion will no longer be enough. What if we could search within a video for specific keywords or topics that the speakers covered? Or skip to a particular speaker, like Michael Gliedman, CIO of the NBA, who joined us in the keynote? These are examples of some of the advances made in video over the last few years that can improve the overall experience. Let’s take a look at this example where we have applied video analytics to the very same keynote recording. These are just some of the capabilities possible with the advancements in our Cisco networked video portfolio and architecture.
Over the next few weeks I and others will shed more light on Cisco’s networked video strategy, which includes transforming Video Entertainment in the home, Video Collaboration in the workplace, and adding Video Intelligence to extract relevant data from video across service provider and enterprise networks.
It was a very fruitful week at the ASIS, and we wish to thank all our IP Surveillance Camera partners for taking the time and interest to work with us on interoperability verification testing of their products with Cisco Medianet. Plugfest has indeed triggered interest in all our partners, and they have been as excited as we are on this partnership. The concept of the network being a fundamental platform for rolling out various services that facilitate deployment and management of rich media networks has been very well received. Partners have shared how important this could be for them, especially in terms of making their solutions more deployable and with regard to customers seeing improved value in their products. Hence, the stage is very well set for building on two key priorities for Cisco: the Network as a Platform vision and Video.
Ed Christmas understands the potential complexities that bringing high-definition video onto the network can entail.
As the managing principal of Sology Solutions, one of our Premier Certified safety and security integrators, he’s worked for the last couple of years to define a video strategy for his customer Dallas County. The plan involved recommending the newly re-architected Cisco Video Surveillance Manager 7.0 as the cornerstone of a business transformation project that goes far beyond just simply improving safety and security for citizens and employees. It aims to help improve the way that services are delivered to citizens.
A key factor in Sology’s choice as a partner lies in the ease of deploying this new video surveillance solution, which was completely rebuilt from the ground up for very large scale video deployments. In this video Ed describes how he was able to go into the customer at 10am in the morning, deploy the software in a virtualised Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) environment, set up the IP video surveillance cameras and have the whole system up and running and providing operational HD video feeds back to Dallas County’s Tax Assessor office within hours. His team were on their way back to the office by 2pm that afternoon.
By taking advantage of another key Cisco innovation, the Cisco medianet proxy service, Ed’s engineers were able to automate the configuration of cameras on the network. MSP is a function of the Cisco switching infrastructure that builds on innovations such as SmartPorts. Using MSP, the network automatically recognizes the new device plugged into the switch port as a video surveillance camera, allocates it an IP address, places it into the correct VLAN, reserves the right amount of bandwidth for delivering video streams to operators and prioritizes the video traffic automatically.
Many of you following this blog are very likely familiar with the Media Services Interface (MSI) and the key role MSI plays in the Medianet architecture. The MSI is an SDK residing on rich media applications and endpoints that makes the network and applications smarter together. Over the past several months the MSI has been increasingly integrated across a wide range of Cisco applications and endpoints. The path forward looks very exciting with plans for many more rich media applications integrating with the MSI.
The Cisco Developer Network program for Medianet system management partners has been in place for some time now and has been instrumental in helping 3rd party network management system partners leverage the benefits of medianet from a network standpoint. We are pleased to announce the expansion of this program to include MSI interoperability verification and testing for system management partners. For the first time, system management partners that are focused on the endpoint and application side of the equation can use the MSI to proactively monitor application performance and accelerate troubleshooting.
One of the key objectives of Medianet is to integrate a smarter network with various media endpoints in order to simplify end-to-end deployments and operations and to enhance quality of experience for the end user. We are very happy to announce Plugfest as a strategic step forward towards meeting this objective. Plugfest is an Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) event to be hosted at the ASIS show (booth 213) in Philadelphia, September 10- 12, 2012. Plugfest at the ASIS will be focused on verifying IP Surveillance Cameras within a Cisco network.
We are very pleased to announce Plugfest for you. Plugfest launches the Media Services Proxy (MSP) capability as part of Cisco Medianet solutions. This would be a very good opportunity for you to get your cameras verified with the Cisco’s Medianet-enabled network by just plugging your camera in. There is no additional development or change required on the end points provided there is compliance to standard based protocols like RTSP, SDP and mDNS, which MSP is based on. On successful verification, your organization along with qualified camera models and the capabilities they have been tested against would be listed on the CDN (Cisco Developer Network) partner page. You would also get the Cisco CDN “Compatible” logo that can be shared externally! You can find all details on Plugfest on the CDN MSP portal. Read More »
