Suraj Shetty, as quoted in Cisco, anticipating video tsunami, builds up network smarts

I’m keeping an eye on the Cisco Media Processing platform. The takeaway is that Cisco is taking another step to position themselves as the company that’s going to help network administrators handle video traffic better.

Cisco marketing is pushing the idea of “Medianet.” The idea is that an intelligent network will understand what format to convert the video and then the hardware will transcode the video so it can play on any device, including digital signage (another area Cisco has been positioning themselves as Number 1). Video transcoding converts the content into different formats so it can be viewed on different types of devices. It’s key to managing bandwidth and storage and it’s been a real brick wall for video.

The first product for Medianet is called the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3000, otherwise known as MXE. It’s expensive — $50k — and I’m not quite sure yet who the customer is. Cisco also introduced the Cisco Advanced Video Services Module (AVSM). It’s part of the Cisco ASR 9000 edge router. The literature says AVSM enables “terabytes of streaming capacity at the aggregation edge while simultaneously offering content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change and error correction.”