Cisco announces video-sharing platform

Cisco's MXE appliance allows media sharing to any device

Cisco Systems has announced the launch of a media processing platform designed to simplify media sharing across device types, such as digital screens, mobile devices and PCs.

"The proliferation of video as a communications and collaboration medium continues to drive new business models for our customers," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technologies group.

The all-in-one system offers media conversion, production and network distribution for firms wishing to deploy targeted media. The first product to launch is the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3000, a hardware appliance dedicated to short-cutting media processing times.

One of the big problems with media is the processing of raw video and its output through a media viewer, whether a PC or mobile device.

The MXE 3000 appliance uses a Windows-based configurable program dubbed a 'folder attendant' to take in content and process it for viewing to specific devices, dependent on file type and other related job parameters.

This allows automation of post-production capabilities such as video composition, authoring, watermarking and text and image overlays, Cisco said.

The vendor also unveiled video-specific findings from its Visual Networking Index forecast for 2007 to 2012, revealing that professional and traditional broadcast video content will form 80 per cent of all internet video viewed on PCs and laptops by 2012, and that global video-on-demand traffic more than doubled from 2007 to 2008.