Cisco has unveiled the next phase of the medianet, an end-to-end architecture for video and rich media that the company says will help network operators and IT managers more effectively manage and deploy multiple video systems.
Cisco announced a new category of "medianet-enabled" products focusing on media transformation. As more organizations use video for effective collaboration, media transformation is designed to make it radically easier for customers to deploy, use and search video across the enterprise.
One of the flagship products designed for media transformation, and a key component of Cisco's architecture, is the Cisco MXE 5600 (Media Experience Engine). With this offering, customers have access to a wide variety of media-processing services, including dynamic format conversions, so that video can be consumed on any device at anytime, regardless of format. The Cisco MXE 5600 offers robust interconnect for live media between Cisco and third party video conferencing systems, desktop endpoints and PC-based video applications. Additionally, the recently enhanced Cisco MXE 3500 makes video more searchable and social. The product can now analyze video content and create tags based on video and audio content, such as speaker or topic. As a result, customers can benefit from automatic social tagging and enjoy opportunities to search and navigate video based on content.
Cisco also introduced a suite of plug-and-play medianet-enabled endpoints. These "smart" endpoints – ranging from a medianet-enabled digital media player to a video surveillance system – include embedded intelligence that enables the network to automatically recognize and configure the endpoints when they are deployed. This not only provides customers with new ways to scale video faster but can also help customers reduce the cost of deploying video.
New Video Innovations
• With Cisco's latest Media Experience Engine, network operators and IT managers now have the ability to move media, regardless of format, on any device, endpoint or application. If the media is not in the right format for the endpoint, it can be automatically adapted to deliver an outstanding customer experience. This helps customers tap into the true value of video in a very scalable way.
• The Cisco MXE 5600 provides robust interoperability capabilities with broad support for Cisco and third-party video conferencing systems, desktop endpoints and PC-based video applications.
• The Cisco MXE 3500 integrates with Cisco Show and ShareTM, a webcasting and video sharing application that helps organizations create highly secure video communities, to provide video discovery and harvesting across the enterprise. Cisco Pulse media services will be integrated into the MXE 3500 in the first half of calendar year 2011, giving customers new ways to easily search and tag video content. Instead of scrolling through massive amounts of content to find relevant video, customers can use solutions such as tagging or speaker recognition to quickly find the desired information.
For more information on medianets, please visit: cisco.com/go/medianet
