Cisco Enhances Video Distribution For Enterprises

Cisco has announced the Cisco Enterprise Content Delivery System (ECDS), a set of video distribution products that work together to address IT leaders’ growing challenge of delivering the highest-quality live and on-demand video content to end users anywhere, anytime.

Today, enterprise IT leaders are facing rapidly rising demands for video on already overloaded networks. ECDS provides a seamless way to manage the video load on the wide area network (WAN) and, at the same time, help control the cost of extending video applications across the organisation.

As a key video infrastructure component of the Cisco medianet architecture, ECDS consists of hardware appliances and Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) virtual blade software. The appliances and software work together to help organisations distribute live video content via streaming or multicasting, and, on-demand video via caching and prepositioning. ECDS also provides an IT-friendly management system for easy setup, configuration, maintenance, and monitoring of video. ECDS works together with Cisco WAAS to form a complete WAN optimisation solution for video, applications and data.

Network managers can flexibly deploy ECDS in any appliance-based or existing virtualised environment at almost any place in the network, enabling customers to maximise previous investments. With comprehensive video format support, ECDS can scale to support from dozens to thousands of users in thousands of locations.

For end users, ECDS helps ensure the best video experience for both scheduled and dynamic, unplanned video content. ECDS can eliminate delays in video playback, intermittent video interruptions, pixilation and other issues commonly associated with video delivery and reception.

With Cisco ECDS, organisations can better use video to communicate to any user and reach more users anywhere on any device. ECDS helps optimise live and on demand one-way video content for a variety of applications such as organisational communications, training, events or executive broadcasts.
IT managers can use ECDS to scale live video streaming without having to turn on multicast; for example, instead of sending 10 video streams of a broadcast to 10 users at a branch office, ECDS sends one stream to the branch and automatically splits that stream at the branch into one for each end user, thus providing better quality video and minimising bandwidth consumption.

ECDS adds intelligence to the network so content can be efficiently cached or prepositioned. On-demand video content, like employee training videos or recorded telepresence meetings, can be pushed out across the WAN during off-peak hours, and then cached locally for access by multiple users. With these capabilities, ECDS minimises the network impact for frequently accessed video content, and helps eliminate delays in video download and playback.

“As businesses use video on a daily basis to increase employee engagement and enhance customer service, IT leaders must wrestle with how to manage the exploding amount of video content over the network, and in particular constrained WAN connections. A key advantage of ECDS that appeals to IT is they can ‘set it and forget it.’ With Cisco ECDS, organisations can optimise their networks to support evolving needs for video today and scale to support tomorrow’s uses,” said Janice Le Litvinoff, director and general manager, Digital Media Systems business unit, Cisco.