Cisco Medianet

A few weeks ago I sat on a panel at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm with Simon Aspinall, Managing Director, Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco - we had all just given talks on the future of Online Video - and it was clear from his talk that what they were planning was quite substantial. Anyway, Cisco have now published a white paper over here with their thoughts. The analysis we would recognise:

A New Generation of Media Challenges
As service providers strive to meet evolving customer demands, they are challenged to adapt to several overriding trends:

Explosive growth in video traffic: According to a recent Cisco Visual Networking Index Study, global IP traffic will reach 44 exabytes (1018) per month by 2012 -- more than six times the total traffic in 2007 -- with video being the dominant driver of growth. The same study estimates that video will account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.

Expanding sources of content: The paradigm of the past, in which content was created by major studios and delivered on a one-way basis to consumers, is over. Professionally developed content from major distributors will continue to have large audiences, but smaller-scale, semi-professional producers developing content for niche audiences will play a much larger role in consumer entertainment. Customers are also demanding more foreign-language content, such as Indian customers wanting "Bollywood" movies and Latino customers wanting Spanish-language programming. A service provider's ability to deliver this "long-tail" content, international programming, and other niche content will be a key competitive differentiator.

Rise of number and type of end devices: Today's customers may be accessing video via a multitude of devices -- standard-definition (SD) or high-definition (HD) TVs, personal computers, gaming consoles, or smartphones and portable media devices. Attempting to deliver media to each of these formats from separate content stores, over separate infrastructures, adds extraordinary complexity and costs. Service providers need mechanisms to efficiently serve all of these end devices with a single medianet.

Rise of user-generated video: The cost of video production and editing tools continues to drop, making video creation and distribution capabilities available to the masses. As more video consumers become video creators, operators can expect user-generated content (UGC) to make up a significant amount of their overall video traffic. Service providers will need new tools to integrate, catalog, and distribute such content to subscribers.

Demand for more social and interactive experiences: Viewers are already engaged in rich social networking and interactive content sharing on the Internet. Now, service providers must bring those same "Web 2.0" capabilities to the TV, bringing personalized home pages, sites like MySpace and Flickr, and RSS feeds and Web content into the TV experience. Operators that can deliver these capabilities will not only gain subscribers and customer loyalty; they will unlock a new world of advertising and supplemental revenue opportunities (Figure 1).

Demand for greater mobility and control: Customers want video content that adapts to their own lives and schedules. They want to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever and however they choose. That means the ability to record and share programs over the network, to access time-shift services such as "look-back" and "start over," and to extend media content across multiple screens (TV, PC, mobile device), even within a single session.

As a colleague, Keith McMahon noted today, Cisco already had a lot of assets in this space, and needed to glue them together - Medianet is clearly the badge by which it is being done.

But it is a signal that the war to build and populate multi-media platforms / ecosystems is beginning if the big iron boys are starting to supply the gear.