Cisco Moves To Optimize Booming Media Traffic

With video and other rich media growing by leaps and bounds on the Internet and in corporate networks, Cisco has decided it’s time to optimize. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company introduced new technologies and solutions it said will better enable “medianets” in home networks, businesses and through Internet service providers.

The company said “data-based communications are being replaced by video and rich media,” and this is straining networks originally designed primarily for data.

‘Immersive New Experiences’

Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies group, said that “in the near future, 90 percent of consumer network traffic will be video and rich media,” resulting not only in new kinds of networks but in “immersive new experiences” that combine rich media, voice and data on a single network platform.

De Beer’s projection is based on a Cisco forecast for the years 2007 through 2012, which showed, among other things, that user-generated video content will triple by 2012.

To accommodate this massive wave of video and other rich media, Cisco’s initiative includes a variety of announcements. The potentially largest one is a “create once and share anywhere” Media Processing platform for enterprises, designed for media conversion, real-time post production, editing, formatting and network distribution.

The Media Processing platform simplifies live and on-demand media traffic between mobile devices, PCs and other viewing devices. The first product within the platform is the Media Experience Engine 3000, which can take video optimized for one kind of device and, in real time, convert it for another device.

AT&T Advances Telepresence

Additionally, the new Cisco ASR 9000 edge router, introduced last month, utilizes an Advanced Video Services Module that provides terabytes of streaming capacity, plus content caching, ad insertion, fast channel change, and error correction. Cisco said AVSM eliminates the need for stand-alone content-delivery components in the network, while moving the…