Cable Operators

A solution worth showing

Meet your customers’ increasing demand for high-quality media, when and where they want it with medianet technologies. A medianet is an intelligent, multimedia-optimized network that successfully responds to the rapid growth of VoD, high definition video, ultra high speed data, and other advanced services. It can also deliver all types of media with a single end-to-end architecture. Here’s how medianet technology can help you:

Media-Aware IP Next-Generation Network

The Cisco Cable IP Next-Generation Solutions framework helps ensure a quality consumer video experience by integrating video intelligence into the IP infrastructure. The framework also helps manage rapid bandwidth growth due to video.

Virtualization Management

Medianet technologies help enable service providers to:

• Manage complexity and scale the infrastructure
• Swiftly and simultaneously introduce new services in all geographic markets
• Exponentially expand content
• More efficiently manage bandwidth consumption

New Revenue Models

A medianet strategy helps support new revenue streams beyond traditional video services. This could include online video, advanced advertising, and transaction-based and revenue-sharing opportunities. It can also help increase service velocity, allowing you to rapidly roll out new services.

Empowering Customers

Integrating medianet technologies into your cable infrastructure helps you deliver high-quality visual experiences – while giving customers what they need to live the connected life.

Keep Pace with the Plot

The story of the Internet has taken a new turn. The dramatic increase in video content makes bandwidth, speed, and scalability more crucial concerns. Cisco’s data-over-cable interface specifications (DOCSIS) service optimization solutions address these challenges--and more. DOCSIS 3.0 can also help cable operators differentiate their businesses from the competition while opening up new revenue streams.

Increased Speed

DOCSIS 1.x and 2.0 provide high speeds and you can easily upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 for advanced services and even greater speed. DOCSIS 3.0 also offers:

• Better performance than DSL; using the latest modems, DOCSIS 3.0 can match speeds offered through fiber-to-the-home services
• Speed that is four to eight times faster than previous DOCSIS versions
• A better experience by using the stat-mux gain achieved by bonding at speeds as low as 10 and 15 Mbps

A Superior Solution

Compared to other cable modem termination systems (CMTS) in the industry, DOCSIS 3.0 offers the highest density. It provides a very rich feature set along with massive scalability and flexibility (including the ability to offer both integrated and modular options). An extensive range of DOCSIS 3.0 customer premises equipment (CPE) devices, complemented by flexible and quadrature amplitude modulator choices (QAMs) is also available.

DOCSIS Technical Information

More Bandwidth

Significant technical innovations at Cisco have yielded a marked increase in bandwidth. DOCSIS 3.0 facilitates bandwidth that is 23 times what the uBR10012 CMTS offered when it was first released. This improvement is also 10 times lower cost.

Easy Implementation

Adopting DOCSIS not only accelerates the deployment of data-over-cable services, but also helps ensure equipment interoperability through a cable operator’s infrastructures. In fact, DOCSIS 3.0 from Cisco increases deployment flexibility and speed because it requires minimal wiring changes to migrate to DOCSIS 3.0. Operators with DOCSIS 1. or 2.0 are offered a clean upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 whenever their business climate requires it.

Fulfilling Demand

DOCSIS 3.0 is part of Cisco’s overall medianet vision: to help cable operators satisfy their customers’ increasing demand for video and multimedia content that’s more accessible, social, and personal. In short, DOCSIS plays a leading role in creating the Connected Life.

Revenue on the Set

With Cisco set-top boxes and the Cisco PowerKEY Conditional Access System (CAS), you can meet your customers’ demands for interactive digital video experiences, while securing your video network. That means you will have the opportunity to not only increase average revenue per subscriber, but also protect your content from piracy. Cisco’s cost-effective set-top boxes will help you differentiate your business, and PowerKEY is preintegrated to facilitate rapid deployment.

Uncompromised Security

PowerKEY is a client/server architecture with elements in both the video headend and your customers’ set-top boxes, and it is supported by a dedicated Cisco development team to ensure the headend and set-top box hardware function harmoniously. PowerKEY includes embedded secure processors, longer keys, and three different encryption levels for unparalleled security. In fact, it has never been compromised in more than 15 years of deployment.

At the video headend office, PowerKEY:

• Acquires, encodes, and transmits video
• Includes conditional access within the network for security

On the set-top box in a consumer home, PowerKEY:

• Decodes compressed digital video and over-the-air broadcasts
• Includes conditional access within the middleware for security

The Cisco PowerKEY system supports multiple CAS configurations through digital video broadcast (DVB) Simulcrypt to integrate with existing systems if necessary.

In addition to significantly minimizing the risk of security breaches, Cisco PowerKEY helps reduce customer service inquiries and allows cable operators to manage resources efficiently through one central provider.

A Flexible, Comprehensive Portfolio

From compact digital set-tops to advanced interactive models and dual-tuner video recorders (DVRs), Cisco set-top solutions give you a complete range of products that support the latest advanced digital interactive services, such as:

• Electronic program guide (EPG), games and other video service integration
• On-screen mosaics
• Parental controls
• Navigation tools and service menus
• Email

Each Cisco set-top box is DVB-C and MPEG-2 compliant, supports PAL video formats, and—with the optional subscriber identity module (SIM) card—is capable of supporting renewable security.

Broadcast Applications

Cisco Z-Series set-top boxes include a broadcast applications layer, which allows you to develop applications or purchase a bundle of applications from Cisco. These bundles are designed to help you quickly enhance your service offering and can include:

• News
• Weather
• Games
• Recipes
• Stock updates
• Horoscopes

The broadcast applications layer resides within the Cisco set-top client as middleware, and provides rich functionality in a very thin client implementation. Applications are accessed via a service portal, are streamed to a set-top on a carousel, and loaded into RAM. Some bandwidth will be allocated for the carousel to stream applications.

With the software developer kit (SDK) that Cisco offers, you will have the tools and resources to develop applications that are tailored for your market.

Extending Medianet to the Home

Set-top boxes are an example of the Cisco medianet vision. With Cisco set-top boxes, you can use high-quality rich media to deliver experiences that are more interactive, personal, and social, helping your customers enjoy The Connected Life at home.

On location, any location

The Cisco Content Delivery System (CDS) helps you deliver the next-generation video and content your customers demand—anywhere, anytime, and on any device—from a single open platform. It’s an end-to-end video delivery solution that transcends traditional video-on-demand (VoD) applications and Internet streaming solutions.

Starring components

There are two components to the Cisco CDS:

• Cisco Content Delivery Engines can be grouped into arrays to work as a single logical system, and you can easily attach additional engines for almost unlimited video storage and streaming capacity.
• Cisco Content Delivery Applications are the software elements of the CDS. These applications implement content processes on top of the Cisco Content Delivery Engines to provide ingest, storage, caching, personalization, and streaming functions.

Services subscribers demand

The Cisco CDS can provide a broader range of services than traditional VoD and Internet streaming solutions. These services include:

• VoD
• Time-shift TV
• Internet video and music
• Barker channels
• Public access, educational, and government channels
• User-generated content services
• Targeted advertising
• Three-screen session shifting
• A wholesale content distribution network (CDN)

The CDS also supports Internet streaming applications for content delivery to devices like PCs and mobile phones. These applications in turn enable the delivery of Video 2.0 applications.

Flexibility for the future

The Cisco CDS is a flexible solution designed for business agility. In fact, it not only delivers the services that current and potential customers want today, but also helps establish a platform for future services. CDS offers:

• Platform flexibility: The Cisco CDS is a software-based solution with multiple streaming and storage technologies, which can be integrated into network platforms.
• Architecture flexibility: Along with distributed architecture, the Cisco CDS offers hierarchical caching and support for multiple screens.
• Operational flexibility: The Cisco CDS facilitates service velocity, nonstop availability, and high scalability from a single platform.

Part of the medianet story

The CDS plays a starring role in the medianet vision by making content accessible anywhere, anytime, and on any device. It also helps satisfy increasing demand for video and multimedia content that’s more accessible, social, and personal. That, in turn, allows your customers to enjoy The Connected Life.