Cisco gets social with Entertainment OS

Cisco on Wednesday announced the availability of Eos, or Entertainment Operating System, its hosted platform for media companies.

"We are here now, ready," said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's media solutions group.

The platform will allow media and entertainment companies to take better advantage of their content, letting them create, manage and grow online communities around sports teams, music acts or TV shows, according to Cisco. For end users, the platform will open the door for more social and personalized content, it said.

Cisco developed Eos with help from Warner Music, which is also the first company to use the platform.

The record company taught Cisco what their artists and customers expect to find online, according to Scheinman.

Currently Warner Music has two sites running live on Eos: Allseanpaul.com and Lauraizibor.com.

Warner was able to build the sites -- which come with blogs, stores and communities -- at a fraction of the cost and time that other platforms require, Scheinman said.

The Eos platform is intended to make it easy for media companies to build Web sites focused on communities, and do that without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to custom build a site, he said.

The Eos platform also includes analytics, which will make it possible for Eos users to better understand their audience. For example, it can give them insight into which Web services visitors are using.

"Again, [this is] a new opportunity for the media companies for the first time to really know their digital customers, which I believe is the core, ultimately, of how we are going to increase the value of that digital customer," Scheinman said.

The last two components of Eos are content management and administration. Today, content is often stored in silos, according to Scheinman. But with Eos it's put in a library, which makes it easier to use content across different sites. The Eos administration platform will help build sites that can be easily customized, he said.

Eos will get a phased roll-out, starting with English-speaking countries and then expanding to other parts of the world, Scheinman said, without revealing specifics.

If successful, Eos will not only be a money maker in itself, but also help generate more network traffic -- which is a good thing for Cisco's network equipment business.

While Cisco is moving into new areas, the company is still proud to be a networking plumber, according to CEO John Chambers.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.