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New Approach to Broadcast Production Will Help Media and Entertainment Companies Increase Revenue, Reduce OpEx and Enhance Agility

AMSTERDAM, IBC 2015, September 10, 2015 – At IBC in Amsterdam, Cisco will showcase its Software-Centric Media Architecture, designed for media, broadcast and entertainment companies. Built on open standards, this new architecture better positions media and entertainment companies to collaborate with third-party software developers and enhance the speed and agility necessary for incorporating new applications into their networks.

Media and entertainment companies face pressures to scale broadcast production and distribution to meet the growing demands for 4K content and OTT video delivery. By moving from proprietary networking and dedicated infrastructure to open IP networking and a programmable media cloud infrastructure, broadcast video production can take place anywhere, and content can be stored anywhere, with on-demand provisioning and scale.

Earlier this year, Cisco introduced its Global Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Program for media and entertainment companies, offering Cisco customers best-of-breed choices from a robust ecosystem of industry software companies (including EVS, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Snell and Sony to name a few,) who are focused on broadcast and media-centric applications, and are certified on the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) next-generation data center platform. Cisco will be showcasing integrated solutions with EVS and Imagine Communications at IBC, giving visitors a look at real-world end-end IP workflows with full management and monitoring capabilities.

Advantages of Cisco® Software-Centric Media Architecture:

Cisco developed its Software-Centric Media Architecture based on its investment, knowledge, and resources in IP networks, software-defined networking (SDN), scalable computing, network function virtualization (NFV), orchestration, and professional media networking (PMN). Key elements include:

• Professional Media Networking Platform (PMN): Transforms today’s proprietary routing infrastructure to an open, IP-based network, by leveraging SDN controllers that increase scale and efficiency, creating a virtual network that is easier to expand and upgrade and cost-effective to deploy.
• Media Cloud: Unified compute, network, and storage resources with a programmable cloud infrastructure that can be flexibly provisioned, automatically configured, and elastically scaled to respond to dynamic business requirements.
• Virtualized Video Processing (V2P): An open and extensible platform that enables innovation in video acquisition, processing, and delivery, with a common infrastructure and orchestration foundation that simplifies and accelerates the deployment of virtualized video processing workflows.
• Cloud Object Store (COS): A video-optimized storage service that supports multiple media applications based on Cisco’s scalable UCS..
• Security: Cisco’s threat-centric security solution that provides end-to-end protection for media and broadcaster business operations spanning the data center to multiscreen content distribution.

Supporting Quotes:

Greg Ireland, research director, Multiscreen Video, IDC “Efficiently delivering content in today’s world of anytime, anywhere video is a growing challenge with operators’ and media companies’ legacy systems. With the power of IP standards-based network infrastructure and cloud-based storage and applications, Cisco can help operators and media companies increase productivity and agility and enable them to move forward with service and applications strategies that are needed to meet customer expectations in an increasingly competitive market."

Dave Ward, chief architect, Cisco "Cisco is leading the broadcast operations of today into a new future based on IP, software defined workflows, virtualization, and DC/Cloud technologies. We are focused on helping our customers simplify their media architectural transitions with our "whole stack" approach and system integration capabilities with our partners to provide complete capture-to-consumption media solutions.”