At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) in Las Vegas, the show was buzzing with news about the latest tablet computers and 4G wireless services. But news about video services also caught our attention: Cisco unveiled its Videoscape platform designed for service providers while Skype had multiple announcements about new video features, an acquisition, and further video integration with Verizon Wireless.
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Cisco Videoscape is a software-centric architecture designed to bring together digital TV and online content with social media and communications applications, designed to provide “immersive” home and mobile video entertainment. The architecture touches the cloud, the network, and client devices to deliver video over the Internet.
New Cisco products supporting the Videoscape elements in the home include a media gateway, an IP set-top box, and software clients for a variety of home and mobile devices. The Videoscape Media Suite offers life-cycle content management, while he Cisco Conductor orchestrates various services and subscriber-management functions. The new Videoscape product families are part of Cisco’s medianet architecture.
Also at CES 2011, Skype launched group video calling for consumers and enterprises. Group video calling is available as part of the new Premium package which offers group video calling together with access to live chat customer support as a day pass for $4.99 or as a monthly subscription for $8.99 per month.
Skype also disclosed has agreed to acquire Qik, a privately company with 60 employees that provide mobile video software and services. Terms of the private acquisition will not be disclosed.
Verizon Wireless and Skype jointly announced that a new version of Skype mobile with video will soon be available on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Mobile Broadband network. The new version will be deeply integrated into a wide range of 4G smartphones to be available by mid-2011.
Finally, Skype announced that new estimates from TeleGeography show international call traffic from Skype users continues to accelerate, and that Skype’s share of international calling minutes has grown to an estimated 24.7% during 2010. Video calling accounted for approximately 41.5% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes in the second half of 2010.
