Cisco Introduces Comprehensive Digital Media System

Sept. 26, 2006

While the Internet is becoming more capable of supporting video and audio applications, organizations until now have not had many options for efficiently providing consistently high quality digital media over their communications networks. At the same time, the growing volume of digital media has left them searching for easier ways to create and manage this promising new form of communications. But this month Cisco Systems introduced a technology suite to their stable of networking products that can help organizations overcome these obstacles. The Cisco Digital Media System (DMS) is the first comprehensive integrated product suite for facilitating the creation, management, and delivery of live and on-demand digital media content over the Internet and other networks.

The Cisco Digital Media System is part of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology group. This group oversees what the company calls "internal venturing." The team that built the Digital Media System and other products within the group operate like start-up businesses and focus on creating new technologies through Cisco's rich internal intellectual and technology resources. The Digital Media System is the latest fruit born from these efforts. News@Cisco spoke with Marthin De Beer, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Emerging Markets Technology group, about the Cisco Digital Media System and how it will help organizations take advantage of the growing communications potential of broadband networks.

What challenge is the Cisco Digital Media System designed to address?

Marthin De Beer: Preparing and managing digital media for delivery over the network has typically required that organizations cobble together individual components from multiple vendors, which is complicated and expensive, requiring slow manual processes and custom integration. The Digital Media System offers all the necessary components for managing and broadcasting digital content, particularly streaming video and audio. By offering a sophisticated and integrated set of components, we believe we can help organizations more affordably take advantage of the many benefits of digital media communications.

What are the components of the Digital Media System?

Marthin De Beer: The Cisco Digital Media System includes digital media encoders, a digital media manager, and a video portal viewer. The DMS supports all major formats, including Windows Media, Real Networks, Apple's QuickTime, MPEG-4, and Adobe's Flash plug-in. The Digital Media Manager system has the intelligence to take encoded video streams and publish them on a variety of delivery devices in the most appropriate format. Also, Cisco network technologies, based on our SONA architecture, can help further increase the capabilities of the system to deliver refined digital media images over communications networks.

Cisco is known for making network routers and switches. Why is Cisco offering this product?

Marthin De Beer: The short answer is that our customers inspired us to create this product. They have a growing need to use digital audio and video to communicate with employees, customers, partners or other groups crucial to their organizations. The idea behind the Cisco Digital Media System comes from Cisco's own need to create, manage, and deliver digital media. Cisco has been using video for our own communications needs for several years, particularly on our News@Cisco Website. Our customers saw what we were doing and were asking us for our insights into this issue. That started the wheels turning as we realized this was becoming a significant market. Our experience in running our own digital media system served as our starting point in building a comprehensive solution to the challenge of using digital media.

Perhaps more importantly, our expertise in Internet protocol, or IP, networks gives us unique insight into how we could best deliver quality video and audio images. We pioneered IP-based telephony, and video is analogous to voice, though much more demanding. The key to both is using the network to ensure the quality of the content as it travels over networks. By tapping our networking knowledge, we were able to design a product suite that effectively and efficiently prepares and manages digital content for delivery over IP-based networks.

Streaming media has been popular for several years. Why is Cisco introducing its content management system now?

Marthin De Beer: There are several coinciding factors that are making the production and management of digital media more important than ever. The Internet has become the first global broadcasting platform. The development of broadband networks now makes it viable to send and view high quality digital media, particular video. At the same time, people are now used to digital media outside the workplace, so they are starting to expect it at work. The exploding popularity of such Websites as YouTube dramatically demonstrates how accessible digital video communications has become. Finally, digital media is a uniquely compelling medium for communications-it tells a story in a way that text or even graphics cannot. Given these developments, we believe digital media systems could become a $1 billion market over the next five to seven years.

Who are the likely customers for the Cisco DMS?

Marthin De Beer: We designed the Cisco DMS for any organization that has a message to deliver to either an internal or external audience. Certainly, Fortune 1000 companies are obvious candidates, since these corporations often have widespread global operations that face geographic barriers to cohesive communications. But the Cisco DMS can be equally appealing to other organizations, such as schools, non-profits, or government entities that need to reach far-flung audiences.

Beyond the first incarnation of our digital media system, which is focused on the use of video-on-demand and live Webcasting for general organizational communications, we also see many promising specialized markets for our technology. For example, due to advances in flat-panel TV technology, companies are now using digital media in place of paper-based ads, what is known as "digital signage." This technology isn't yet widely used in North America, but it is spreading rapidly in many European and Asian countries. Some European sports stadiums, for example, now use giant flat-panels to display ads rather than billboards. Such technology offers a huge advantage over previous paper-based signage because ads can be instantly and automatically changed. This is just one example of how network-delivered digital media is expanding into different industries. As the technology matures, we believe the use of networked digital media communications will grow rapidly, driving even greater need for effective and efficient digital media systems.