Cisco evolves Videoscape with Cloud TV software

Cisco’s licensing of software from ActiveVideo Networks enhances the networking giant’s Videoscape platform and boosts the status of its junior partner. “We’re really the only cloud-based platform,” said Edgar Villalpando, Active Video SVP marketing and content relations during a panel at last week’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.

ActiveVideo’s Cloud TV product “allows for lightning-fast development of next-gen television on the box in the home,” Villalpando said. As such, it plays into a theme that prevailed among video technology companies at this year’s massive event, namely: the management of over-the-top (OTT) video on multiple screens. “Our goal is that consumers in the home get consistent TV experiences.”

The news of the Cisco/Active Video partnership is one of the latest developments involving Videoscape , the service provider platform that Cisco launched a year ago to bring together digital TV, online video and related applications.

Videoscape first appeared at CES 2011, when Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said Australian telco Telstra was using the architecture to provide video across set-tops and tablets. A lot has happened within Cisco and its video-related businesses since then, including the following:

•    Acquisition of adaptive bit rate (ABR) player Inlet Technologies, Feb.
•    Decision to close its Flip camera business, April
•    Restructuring and streamlining of overall Cisco operations, May
•    Sale of set-top box plant in Mexico to Foxconn, July
•    News of Korean telco KT’s adoption of Videoscape, Sept.
•    Intro of 9800 series hybrid QAM/IP gateway, Nov.
•    Acquisition of video control plane startup BNI Video, Nov.
•    Announced Cloudverse for public, private and hybrid clouds, Dec.

Along with the news that Canada’s Rogers Communications, Israeli-based Yes and France’s Numericable had become Videoscape customers, Cisco last week announced new capabilities that enable “video in the cloud” consumer experiences and drive consistent multi-screen viewing.

Cisco also announced new client and network (aka cloud) elements of Videoscape. Among the client technologies were the 9800 series gateway (which had a soft launch at the U.S. SCTE CableTec Expo in November) and the Voyager Vantage software, which connects set-tops to the cloud. On the network side are Voyager Virtual, an interface that delivers IP video to legacy MPEG-2 set-tops and Conductor, a back-office technology for QAM video.

Neither Cisco nor ActiveVideo had planned to announce the link between companies at CES, but Multichannel News Technology Editor Todd Spangler noticed similarities between Cisco’s Voyager software and ActiveVideo’s own demos. As a result, in the words of a PR rep close to the companies, “the cat got…out of the bag.” According to Splangler’s subsequent story, Cisco opted to license the software because, whereas Cisco was focused internally on all-IP development, ActiveVideo offered it an IP bridge to legacy boxes.

Customers of ActiveVideo include the U.S. cable operator Cablevision Systems, which uses the platform to power an interactive channel with more than 40 applications, and the Home Shopping Network (HSN), which uses it to launch interactive content from EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format) prompts. The platform drives feed-agnostic VOD navigation. “Essentially, we’re a browser,” Villalpando said.

Going into CES 2012, ActiveVideo had two announcements: The launch of the latest version of its Cloud TV platform, which leverages the speed and flexibility of HTLM5, and the demonstration of voice-activated TV navigation, using devices that support Apple’s Siri personal assistant application. Villalpando described HTLM5’s supplanting of Flash as one of the biggest changes in the next-gen video landscape over the past year and predicted that voice navigation would “become an incredible killer gap, when its combined with gesture.”

On the Cisco side, Videoscape sits at the intersection of two of the five areas of focus that emerged from the company’s restructuring in 2011: data center virtualization/cloud and video. (The other three: core, collaboration and architectures for business transformation.)

In a YouTube video shot at the Venetian hotel, where Cisco had established its CES base camp, Jasper Anderson, SVP and GM of Cisco’s service provider video network group, said that customers were looking at two aspects of the cloud. “One is the cost-efficiencies that you get out of running more modern data centers, UCS (unifed computing system)-like servers, using virtualizing technology.”

“But also, specifically in service provider video, we’re seeing functionality moving back into the cloud, away from what maybe in the past was running directly on the set-box,” he said. “Now there are different levels of service and mixes of service. So you see things like cloud DVR becoming a priority, (and) social media-type applications blending in with the experience on the TV.”

Cisco’s incorporation of Active Video within its Videoscape platform boosts prospects for the six-year-old, privately held company. But the company was also bucked up by news in December that a U.S. District Court had denied a motion by Verizon to stay monthly royalty payments imposed in a November ruling in a patent infringement case.

In several decisions, Verizon has been found liable for up to $250 million in damages, interest and royalties for its infringement of ActiveVideo intellectual property. Several cloud-related features are part of Verizon’s FiOS video platform.

“We did not want to do this,” Villalpando said in an interview at CES, regarding the action against Verizon. (As it happens, Verizon is a Cisco customer.) “We had established a relationship with Verizon with the expectation that they would license our platform. They decided to do it on their own. We just want them to stop.”