AT&T Digital Media Solutions

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Mirroring pretty much Cisco’s total solution offering and following on from what we always say in presentations – that digital out of home is a content-delivery play more than a digital signage play here’s the list of solutions that AT&T are saying are available today and go to make up their new AT&T Digital Media Solutions offering.

This is, we believe, a very good partnership that STRATACACHE will now be involved with and our congratulations go to them.

  • AT&T Intelligent Content Distribution Service
    A network-based Content Delivery Network (CDN) service that replicates
    information across the Internet, such as Web page content, large files
    for download, live video and video-on-demand. At the heart of the
    service is the ability of the AT&T global network to deliver content
    closer to the end-user by determining the optimal distribution path
    based on factors such as server load capacity and user proximity.
    Because the content is sent from the nearest and best caching node, CDN
    customers are able to distribute files to end-users more efficiently.
    What’s more, the service can significantly improve Web site capacity,
    reliability and performance because AT&T delivers content that uses its
    network of geographically distributed and diversely placed servers.
  • Content Ecosystem
    AT&T is creating an ecosystem of software providers that it is working
    to simplify indexing, tagging and encoding services that are required
    to format content for delivery. Today, AT&T is announcing the first of
    these agreements with ExtendMedia, a Boston-based provider of digital
    content services software, Qumu, an Emeryville, Calif-based software
    company that enables organizations to easily capture, manage, publish
    and distribute live and on-demand video content while leveraging
    existing IT infrastructure, and Stratacache, a Dayton, Ohio-based
    software and services company that provides both multi-platform
    software and appliance based technology designed to empower the
    delivery of media applications within the distributed Wide Area Network
    or Internet/intranet powered enterprise.
  • AT&T Digital Signage(SM)
    An end-to-end managed service that enables businesses to distribute
    their own customized video and other multimedia content to both
    employees and customers.

    AT&T Digital Signage helps customers sell more, communicate with
    customers and associates more efficiently and drives new advertising
    and product sales revenue via emerging media networks.

    The AT&T service is scalable and typically delivered on High Definition
    LCD monitors displayed in high-traffic areas, such as retail outlets,
    employee lunch rooms, airport terminals, hotel lobbies and office
    reception areas.

    Application examples range from breaking national news to
    up-to-the-minute local weather conditions to employee benefit updates
    to the latest Dow Jones industrial average.

  • Broadcast Video
    A host of full-motion video transport services that deliver
    high-quality video images and stereo-quality audio over a fiber-optic
    network.

Cathy Martine, executive vice president-Content Distribution, who will be heading up the new business unit to lead AT&T’s enterprise digital media efforts has a lot to do – it probably wasn’t easy getting all these folks together, analysing them etc, doing the deal but it’s gonna be tough for the AT&T guys to sell this – even to their existing enterprise clients.

It will be interesting to see who will be first to take an offering such as this – a bank perhaps or a major retailer?

More likely as with Cisco’s example the week before last (Axa) a corporate communications / ego-TV / reception based Foyer-TV rollout across many offices.


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