DailyDOOH

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

We are hearing from a number of people that the ‘next generation’ of Cisco media player is likely to be ‘Adobe Flash Only’ and wouldn’t / doesn’t support other media types.

We spoke to several in the industry to gauge their opinion and got a variety of different views. We asked does it make sense?

• “does to me, H264 + SWF means you can do pretty much everything”
• “nope, there’s no Flash ASIC, and Flash is going to run slower than native content formats, so not sure why they’d do that” BUT he added “their boxes are PPC-based so maybe they licensed the code and wrote some new native code?”.
• “No … that is working backwards. Flash is important but has inherent issues with memory leaks that all platforms in all technologies have to deal with. HTTP5 is gaining popularity as an alternative so I don’t get it. Does not make sense to me”
• “no…that would completely limit the content option for the operator”
• “not at all, unless they buy adobe”
• I would be suprised since they are a ‘Video’ in the enterprsie company… maybe it’s only dynamic data through flash?

And that last point was re-iterated by Dave Haynes who told us “anything I have seen from Cisco in the past year hammers away at how they are all about video” and he pointed us at this recent piece of Cisco PR which says, and we quote…

“Currently video is about 50% of all Internet traffic, but by 2013 Cisco believes that video will surge to about 90% of all Internet traffic. As such, the company is putting significant resources toward its overall strategy around driving the growth of pervasive video. Last Friday, Cisco unveiled the next phase of its pervasive video strategy, and central to this is Cisco’s digital signage business. As part of this unveiling, Cisco introduced its newest digital media player for signage – the DMP 4310 – which boasts some very unique capabilities for the quick and seamless set up of networked digital signage deployments”

Dave Haynes summed up the rumour by saying “Bottom line if the buzz is that the new platform only plays Flash, then that makes no sense at all. Video is pretty much all Cisco talks about these days. It’s at the core of what they are doing, so not supporting video just wouldn’t be on with them.”.

The Cisco in me (sorry the Cynic in me) would say that Cisco is all about moving video because the more (data) it moves, the more its expensive network gear is needed!

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 17:28 @769 and is filed under Scuttlebut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.