Meeting the IP video challenge

To succeed in future, service providers will need technology that can meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations

If you’ve ever found yourself becoming addicted to the latest online TV series, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that video is increasingly dominating the internet. In fact, Cisco predicts that by 2020, as much as 82% of IP traffic will come from video

The way people want to watch video is also changing. Rather than inflexible and restrictive bundles, they’re coming to expect personalised, user-friendly services. Services that make it easy to watch the film, TV and live streams they want. When and where they want.

And they want to be able to access this content seamlessly across the growing number of devices they own. They might pause a film on their laptop at home and then restart it on their tablet on the train the next day.

These expectations are only going to get stronger: Cisco forecasts that there will be 11 billion connected devices by 2020. And people under 25 watch twice as much mobile video as 25-39 year olds.

Supporting the agile video services of the future

The massive growth in online video is a big opportunity for telecoms, cable and over-the-top businesses. But more immediately, it’s something of a headache. The increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, demands for online video threaten to place an unmanageable burden on legacy systems. A fragmented infrastructure, providing video through separate platforms and distribution networks, is simply not up to supporting the services that customers now want.

Cisco’s powerful video solutions, like our Infinite Video Platform , can help service providers meet these expectations. The Infinite Video Platform’s integrated cloud infrastructure can create and deliver new services efficiently and cost-effectively.

The platform ensures unbeatable video quality. Its end-to-end visibility and powerful analytics enable you to manage complex operations smoothly, proactively identifying and resolving potential problems. It’s delivered as a service, giving you the ability to rapidly launch and refine new products. And it also allows you to publish content across multiple devices, offering customers a seamless experience.

Underpinning all this, our uncompromising security gives you the confidence to accelerate into the future.

Stand out from the crowd

With so many different providers competing for an online video audience, standing out from the crowd is hard. And since the market is developing so rapidly, no one knows exactly what kind of services will be the real revenue drivers of the future.

So alongside supplying a peerless viewing experience, it’s also important for providers to have the capacity to develop and trial new services quickly. This is one of the Infinite Video Platform’s key benefits. It deals with the technical side of service creation, so you’re free to focus on what’s best for your business.

The platform has many capabilities – but its real strength lies in bringing them all together into one place. This not only makes it easier to manage services efficiently, but also creates new business opportunities through providing better customer data. A deeper understanding of viewer behaviour can be used to drive increasingly important functions such as powerful analytics, personalised content discovery and targeted advertising.

And we add major new features every quarter, so it’s always getting better. No one knows what the future holds, but you’ll always have the latest technology at your disposal.

There are limitless ways in which Cisco’s next generation video technology can help service providers not only meet the challenge of online video, but use it to drive innovation and growth.

Are your systems ready to support the agile video services of the future? Find out more about how the Cisco Infinite Video Platform can help.