What are your plans for St. Patrick’s Day? Why not celebrate it the true Irish way by watching the festivities happening at the Christchurch in Cork, Ireland! For the first time ever, citizens will be able to watch St. Patrick’s Day celebrations occurring on both sides of the pond through a live simulcast link between San Francisco’s City Hall and their sister city of Cork, Ireland (more information here).

At 1:00 pm PDT, San Franciscans in City Hall Plaza will be able to see the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terry Shannon, kick off a live broadcast of Pulses of Tradition – a festival of traditional Irish music and dancing taking place inside the beautiful ChristChurch at the heart of Cork. Festival-goers on the other end will be able to see the finale of San Francisco’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade as it arrives at the Plaza, from a live display in City Hall. In addition, revelers in San Francisco will be able to toast their Irish friends as, for the first time, Moylan’s Beer (from Movato, California) will be toasted over Cisco TelePresence.

Green with envy that you won’t be in San Francisco City Hall Plaza to attend the parade? Don’t worry – Cisco and U-Stream have you covered. Check back here tomorrow, or access the live stream from your mobile phone or tablet at this link. You will join an expected 45,000 attendees in San Francisco in a first of its kind, global St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

Live broadcast by Ustream

This celebration could only be enabled through the power of the network with Cisco. Cisco TelePresence Codec C90 systems in both San Francisco and Cork will provide a high-quality video connection between both cities thanks to a collaboration with service provider UPC in Ireland; Cisco TelePresence will also stream the live video out through U-Stream to remote viewers throughout the world.

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Tags: cork, san francisco, sf, St. Patrick's Day, TelePresence, ustream, video

The Enterprise Video team is on the move again, this time to Cisco Live Melbourne!

Cisco Live Melbourne runs March 20-23 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

You can catch Enterprise Video demos in multiple areas of the World of Solutions.

For starters, check out the main Cisco area will feature the latest in Cisco Digital Signage, including signs with touch interactivity, as well as kiosk-based signs with endless aisle applications.

Next, head over to the Collaboration area, which features the latest in integration across our video content solution with new ways to capture, transform and share video. Be sure to stop by this demo following Rob Lloyd’s keynote, as we will be “pulsing” it just like we did for Cisco Live London!

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Tags: cisco live, cisco live melbourne, clmel, digital signage, ECDS, enterprise content delivery system, enterprise video, physical security, video, video surveillance

Many things need to be taken into consideration when choosing a collaboration endpoint technology:  what’s the experience you want to create, how you plan to use it, what environment must it accommodate? The analogy I like to use is “it’s like shopping for a car.” There are many considerations to be made when buying a car:  It must meet your lifestyle, your transportation needs, the number of passengers and type of cargo you intend to carry.

A single person is more likely to choose a different type of car than people with families. Active people may choose an SUV to carry  all their sporting equipment, or for the adventures they take on rugged terrain. This thought process also comes into play when choosing a collaboration solution. The ultimate goal is to have the right communications tool for the right task.

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Digital Signage Expo (DSE) was full of energy this year and the continued expansion of the digital signage market was clearly evident. I’ve watched the digital signage industry evolve over the past five years from static content on traditional screens to customized, rich media content on a multitude of connected devices. At this year’s DSE the continued innovation and excitement was undeniable. The exhibit hall floor was packed with attendees who were eager to learn about the advancements in the technology and the industry as well as how to get the most out of their digital signage deployments. Throughout the EXPO floor, speaking sessions, and events the buzz was around interactive and engaging signage.

Cisco announced new digital signage innovations, delivered through the Cisco® Interactive Services solution set, that provide enhanced interactive capabilities through video, Web applications and touchscreen digital signs. Cisco also announced new customers that showcase the continued expansion of the digital signage market, including the Canadian city of Edmonton and parx casino® in Pennsylvania. In addition, Cisco received four Apex Awards, handed out by the Digital Signage Federation recognizing innovation and excellence in the digital signage industry. For more insight from the show floor, check out this video of Erica Schroeder, Director of Marketing for Enterprise Video at Cisco.

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Tags: Apex awards, business video, Cisco, cisco digital media suite, digital sign, digital signage, digital signage expo, enterprise video, interactive media, on-demand video, signage, streaming, video, video content

In our last blog, we talked about mediatrace which is one of the medianet media monitoring features. In this blog, let’s talk about IPSLA video operations (VO), another media monitoring feature.

IPSLA VO generates realistic synthetic traffic similar with the same characteristics of real media traffic (e.g. burstiness, packet size, packet rate, etc.). Without involving the endpoints, IT operators can generate traffic and observe its impact on the network and other existing applications. This makes IPSLA VO a powerful tool to validate network configurations and capacity:

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Tags: business video, enterprise networks, IPSLA VO, medianet, mediatrace, rich media applications, video