Cisco Launches Network Based Media Processing Platform For Video

Today, Cisco announced a new media media processing platform that provides media conversion, real-time post production, editing, formatting, and network distribution capabilities for formatting video and rich media on any device. The first product now offered for this new platform is dubbed the Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) 3000. A rack-mount device that delivers real-time post production and processing capabilities such as watermarking, voice and video editing, text and image overlays and noise reduction for creating customized broadcast quality video experiences.

The MXE supports file-to-file transcoding only, not real-time streaming, and supports H.264, QuickTime, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI, Windows Media, VC-1 and H.264 as input formats and spits out video for MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, AC-3 Audio, Layer II Audio, Windows Media Proxy, MPEG1 and MPEG 2 amongst others.

While not that impressive as just a stand alone transcoding solution, the unique aspect is that the MXE allows you to do complex video editing like stitch clips to form a single contiguous clip, make graphic overlays that include the addition of title slides, captions, logo insertions, watermarking and voice overlays. The graphics feature supports Flash 8 Pro template authoring and supports Web Services and XML APIs. The system also includes a ton of monitoring functions and pre-processing options.

This product announcement should come as no surprise to anyone since Cisco is hard at work to move the entire ecosystem of video creation, transcoding and delivery to the network layer and bundle more video functionality into all of their network based systems. Once these types of solutions can start doing things like transcoding and delivery in real-time, that should be a catalyst for the industry. That being said, with the economy being what it is today, Cisco is going to have a harder time in the near-term in selling such solutions unless the customer is able to save money in the long run by using just one platform.

No word yet on what the MXE costs but I will updated the post in a few hours when I hear back. Cisco says the list price of the unit is $65k.

Comments

[hankG]

Interesting. But not very core technology. Cisco tried to build streaming / CDN stuff before and it never worked out. IMHO Cisco should keep building great switches and routers and stop doing higher level stuff.

[danny ortega]

Not quite sure I understand. Is the editing interface a web app? If so this is pretty cool. We have been looking for something that would give the folks in our company the ability to do simple content creation. Thanks for the info Dan.

-Danny

[grinsandfun]

"Network" or "Premise" I always (when talking service based) tend to lean that if a box is to be at your site (colo, etc) - it is a Premise based solution. If it is API or "in the cloud" I tend to call it Network based..

BTW - I tend to agree with Hank - Cisco will probably have issues outside of their core. (just my opinion)

[TJ]

This is cool. It looks like a good step on the way to the killer app for transcoding - passing codec etc. requirements in the header and having it all handled in the hardware. I would love to see realtime transcoders like this at CDNs, pulling mezzanine formats from my origin and transcoding on the fly when requested. There's a long tail solution for ya.

Ripcode released an appliance this year that's headed in a similar direction, but just focused on mobile for now. Neat stuff.

[NK]

Dan, any word if this was actually an Anystream OEM? If you read over the user guide, the settings format is ".awp" same as Anystream.

[Dan Rayburn]

I don't know. Cisco didn't mention anything about Anystream on the call, but I didn't ask.