Cisco Launches Content Delivery System for Personalized Video and IPTV

Telecommunications equipment giant, Cisco, says that it has expanded the video and IPTV delivery capabilities of its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network architecture (note: the latter, generally referred to as "IP NGN," is a suite of technologies designed to enhance IP service control and enable content personalization), with the launch of its Cisco Content Delivery System (CDS). According to the company, the new platform--which is based on technologies Cisco acquired through its purchase of Arroyo earlier this year (see [itvt] Issue 6.92 Part 1)--offers cable operators and telcos a highly extensible platform for delivery of VOD and other time-shifted TV services, and allows them to accelerate the creation and distribution of advanced entertainment, interactive media and advertising services to their customers' television sets, PC's, mobile handsets, portable media players, and other devices.

Cisco says that the CDS, which is being used by Charter and Time Warner Cable and which is in trials with a number of other wireline operators around the world, is composed of a network of appliances known as Content Delivery Engines (CDE's), which implement content storage, ingest, distribution, personalization and streaming capabilities. Groups of CDE's form a virtual platform for deployment of a range of Content Delivery Applications (CDA's): in various combinations, the latter enable service providers to deploy subscriber services, such as targeted ad-insertion in VOD and broadcast video; TV time-shifting; local programming; "long tail" content services; and public, educational and government channels. Cisco is touting the CDS as offering a "network-centric" approach to digital video and IPTV delivery that "differs significantly from the monolithic, centralized, server-based products available to date": it derides the latter as "proprietary, hardware-centric, application-specific devices that are difficult and expensive to scale, cumbersome to operate and maintain, and unable to support the growth of video content and the proliferation of end-user devices."

According to Cisco, the CDS offers the following advantages over existing solutions:

• Scalability. The company says that, regardless of system size and the number and mix of CDE's deployed, the CDS (in centralized, decentralized or hybrid configurations) operates as a single logical system with virtually unlimited capacity for ingest, storage and streaming. Because ingest, storage and streaming are physically separated into separate CDE's, the company says, each function scales independently, making the CDS a flexible and cost-effective solution for delivering long-tail content, time-shifted programming and user-generated content. According to Cisco, the solution takes advantage of a unique hierarchical storage design that enables the development of large content libraries, while simplifying content storage management: programming is preserved in a common storage array that is instantly accessible for streaming anywhere in the network, the company says, while intelligent caching automates delivery of the content to the network edge in response to viewer demand. Thus, Cisco claims, the most popular content at any point in time is cached locally on CDE's at the edge of the network, thereby decreasing bandwidth demand on the network backbone.
• Non-stop service availability. Cisco says that the CDS uses resource pooling and load balancing to dynamically allocate storage and streaming resources across available CDE's, based on real-time subscriber demand. This, it claims, allows any CDE within an array to instantly assume the identity and state of another, enabling automatic failover and maintaining a high-quality viewing experience when a server is unavailable due to a maintenance upgrade or hardware failure.
• Network linkages. Unlike traditional VOD systems, Cisco says, the CDS eliminates the need to pre-position content at every streaming node in the network. According to the company, delivery of any content, from ingest to playout on the subscriber's screen, occurs within 300 milliseconds, regardless of where the content is physically stored within the network. The company claims that this latency is much lower than for any other available solution, and that it "enables the first true convergence of live TV with on-demand content, delivering personalized streams to each subscriber in the network without disrupting the broadcast timeline."

Originally Published: December 5, 2006  in [itvt] Issue 7.08 Part 2

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