Article

Cisco continues DOOH push, unveils new enterprise video system

Tech giant launches new enterprise video delivery system, pushes digital signage applications.

July 6, 2011 by Christopher Hall

Tech giant Cisco is continuing its push into the digital signage space.

Cisco today announced its new Enterprise Content Delivery System, a video distribution system company executives say has important applications for digital out-of-home.

Whether it's for streaming live trainings or conferences in corporate communications applications, or for providing canned video trainings on retail or bank digital signage displays — ECDS brings IT departments further into the DOOH loop and gives them a seamless way to better manage the video load, according to Janice Le Litvinoff, general manager of Cisco's Digital Media Systems Business Unit

IT departments are now having to scale their networks to support different kinds of video playing on different kinds of screens, from desktops to smartphones, she said in an interview earlier this week.

"People now want video anywhere, anytime," Litvinoff said.

ECDS is a set of video distribution products that work together to address IT leaders' growing challenge to deliver live and on-demand video content to end users "anywhere, anytime."

And for digital signage operators, the ECDS can help them easily and cost effectively scale video over their existing WAN infrastructure, she said.

"ECDS enables companies to stream more video to their digital signs using less bandwidth, thus allowing organizations to easily extend their digital signage solutions to reach more customers," she said. "With ECDS in place, signage operators can deliver more video content to more signs, without an additional investment in network bandwidth."

Cisco says that enterprise IT leaders are today facing rapidly rising demands for video on already overloaded networks. ECDS provides a "seamless" means to manage the video load on the wide area network (WAN) and, at the same time, keep down the cost of extending video applications across the organization, according to today's announcement.

The key is you need a mechanism to deliver video content as close to the end user as possible. That's where ECDS comes in," Litvinoff said.

ECDS is a key video infrastructure component of the Cisco medianet architecture, consisting of hardware appliances and Cisco Wide Area Application Services virtual blade software. The hardware/software teaming works together to help operators distribute live video content via streaming or multicasting and on-demand video via caching and prepositioning. The ECDS management system has been designed to be IT-friendly for easy setup, configuration, maintenance and monitoring of video. And it works together with Cisco WAAS to form an overall WAN-optimization solution for video, applications and data, the company said.

• ECDS is made up of three deployment options: The Cisco Media Delivery Engine 1100 and the Cisco MDE 3100 are network appliances that scale to 500 and 5,000 concurrent users respectively. The third option is the Cisco MDE 50WVB, a software virtual blade that supports up to 200 simultaneous users on a Cisco WAAS appliance.
• All three ECDS products work together to deliver video as needed without slowing down the performance of business critical data applications or other live video communications such as Cisco TelePresence – running simultaneously on the same network.
• ECDS works together with Cisco WAAS for WAN optimization or functions as a standalone solution for video optimization. Customers can deploy Cisco WAAS alone for application acceleration and essential video scaling, or ECDS by itself if they are seeing significant video usage and immediate video scaling challenges. ECDS provides video support for formats such as Flash, H.264 and Windows Media.
• ECDS helps improve the performance of Cisco collaboration and video applications such as Cisco Show and Share and Cisco Digital Signage for high quality video to digital signs.
• ECDS also supports third-party video applications and endpoints such as mobile devices or tablets.
• ECDS works with other video infrastructure components of the Cisco medianet architecture like the Cisco MXE Media Experience Engines and Cisco TelePresence Content Server to provide a complete workflow from video content creation to management, delivery and sharing.

According to Cisco, network managers can flexibly deploy ECDS in any appliance-based or existing virtualized environment at almost any place in the network, enabling customers to maximize previous investments. With comprehensive video format support, ECDS can scale to support from dozens to thousands of users in thousands of locations.

"When you think about video applications, it should be seamless," she said. "It's all about supporting as many formats as possible."

ECDS is aimed at helping to ensure the best video experience for planned and unplanned video content for end-users, Cisco said. The system is designed to eliminate delays in video playback, intermittent video interruptions, pixilation and other issues commonly associated with video delivery and reception, according to Litvinoff.

Steven Reese, director of solutions marketing for communications and data services firm Nexus IS, said in today's announcement that his company has a customer that had been looking to offer high quality video-on-demand for students and teachers as a way to share knowledge.

"The Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery System proved to be the ideal solution to deploy video pervasively throughout the school district on their existing network infrastructure," he said. "We're excited that ECDS enables rich media experiences for our customers to take advantage of the power of both live and on-demand video streaming."