Trials set this spring with Verizon, later with France Telecom
It wasn’t a whiz bang product announcement, as some had expected. But it was significant, and expected, nonetheless.
At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show conference in Las Vegas, Cisco said it will trial a home telepresence service in the U.S. this spring with Verizon, and in France later this year with France Telecom. Home telepresence uses a consumer’s existing HDTV and broadband connection to deliver video communication.
Cisco says its business TelePresence products and services are the company’s fastest-growing emerging technology. And Cisco is in the process of acquiring videoconferencing leader Tandberg in an effort to fill out the mid-range and low-end of its videoconferencing and telepresence offerings.
CES is quickly becoming an important venue for Cisco, as Barron’s Eric Savitz notes. At the show, Cisco said it has shipped more than 200 million consumer devices to date, and that more than one million videos from its Flip pocket videocam product were uploaded through FlipShare software in December 2009. These uploads represent three million minutes of Flip videos viewed, which is equivalent to more than six years of continuous video streaming, representing an increase of 395% from December the year before.
Also at CES, Cisco said it would provide TV network NBC with a “medianet” — a media-aware IP-based video network infrastructure — for coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in February. Cisco says its video infrastructure will enable real-time editing by NBC personnel in Vancouver, New York and Las Vegas, and will allow for the transfer of gigabyte-sized files of content between locations and then delivered to TV, PC and smartphone screens.
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