Video driving evolution of network into 'medianet' 11 December, 2008 By Chris Talbot

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Cisco has been talking about video as an important business technology for the last couple of years and how it sees video growing in corporate and service providers networks, as well as making its way into the home network.

"However, what we have seen happening around the world from an economic point of view over the last six months has really brought video more to the forefront," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of the Emerging Technologies Group and co-chair of the Video Council at Cisco Systems.

Businesses are looking for ways to make employees more productive and effective while also trying to reduce costs. They're also looking for ways to take their best resources and make them available globally, he said.

"We believe ... that the use of rich media technologies will play a very important role moving forward in how we work, live, play and learn," De Beer said.

The Internet of the past was really about transportation of data and acting as the information superhighway, but it's evolving to become more of a media highway and transporting rich media, he said. With all this rich media traffic, the network will have to fundamentally change into what Cisco is calling the "medianet," he said.

Cisco announced two new products that will help fuel the medianet -- the Media Experience Engine 3000 and the Advanced Video Services Module. Cisco also announced the 1.5 release of its TelePresence solutions.

Medianet is a new type of network that will carry video and all forms of rich media in a better way than is done now, De Beer said. On top of medianet will be specific systems that will deliver new visual networking or video experiences (including TelePresence). Medianet will enable all kinds of devices to share any data, with the network itself sending data in an appropriate format to the end-user's device.

Four major video systems will make use of the medianet concept, including TelePresence, digital media (signage, desktop video, enterprise TV), physical security (video surveillance, cameras and access control), and unified communications (video calling, WebEx, interoperability), he said.

De Beer noted that video has never been perfect. If the video wasn't available in the right format for the device trying to view it, it either couldn't be viewed or the experience would be poor, he said. Medianet will change this, changing the video data to correspond with whatever format the end-user is able or prefers to view.

"It makes video and rich media a lot more accessible," he said.

Another key application of the technology will be real-time language translation, making it much easier to leap over language barriers. When the technology becomes available, Cisco will be able to translate between 20 different languages, with more languages being added later on.

At the same time, video content (such as digital movies) could also be translated on the fly.

"That will apply to any piece of content that has an audio stream attached to it," De Beer said.

He added, "What we're talking about now is effectively video routing."