We are hearing from a number of people that the ‘next generation’ of Cisco media player is likely to be ‘Adobe Flash Only’ and wouldn’t / doesn’t support other media types.
We spoke to several in the industry to gauge their opinion and got a variety of different views. We asked does it make sense?
- “does to me, H264 [1] + SWF means you can do pretty much everything”
- “nope, there’s no Flash ASIC, and Flash is going to run slower than native content formats, so not sure why they’d do that” BUT he added “their boxes are PPC-based so maybe they licensed the code and wrote some new native code?”.
- “No … that is working backwards. Flash is important but has inherent issues with memory leaks that all platforms in all technologies have to deal with. HTTP5 is gaining popularity as an alternative so I don’t get it. Does not make sense to me”
- “no…that would completely limit the content option for the operator”
- “not at all, unless they buy adobe”
- I would be suprised since they are a ‘Video’ in the enterprsie company… maybe it’s only dynamic data through flash?
And that last point was re-iterated by Dave Haynes who told us “anything I have seen from Cisco in the past year hammers away at how they are all about video” and he pointed us at this recent piece of Cisco PR which says, and we quote…
“Currently video is about 50% of all Internet traffic, but by 2013 Cisco believes that video will surge to about 90% of all Internet traffic. As such, the company is putting significant resources toward its overall strategy around driving the growth of pervasive video. Last Friday, Cisco unveiled the next phase of its pervasive video strategy, and central to this is Cisco’s digital signage business. As part of this unveiling, Cisco introduced its newest digital media player for signage – the DMP 4310 – which boasts some very unique capabilities for the quick and seamless set up of networked digital signage deployments”
Dave Haynes summed up the rumour by saying “Bottom line if the buzz is that the new platform only plays Flash, then that makes no sense at all. Video is pretty much all Cisco talks about these days. It’s at the core of what they are doing, so not supporting video just wouldn’t be on with them.”.
The Cisco in me (sorry the Cynic in me) would say that Cisco is all about moving video because the more (data) it moves, the more its expensive network gear is needed!
7 Comments To "Next Generation Cisco Media Player"
#1 Comment By Bozo On 21 January 2011 @ 18:36 @817
these guys are clueless clowns!
#2 Comment By Howard Smith On 21 January 2011 @ 19:31 @854
Flash leaks memory!!!
Please dont drink the Apple Koolaid. The leaks are down to poor actionscript creation (so rather like blaming M$/Visual Studio/.NET because someone wrote a crap piece of software that crashes). So level the leaks at the agencies/creatives by all means.
So if the thing supported video AND widgets that were Cisco created (I’m thinking weather, news, dynamic text overlays over video etc) and well developed so that all memory pointers were released properly would not that mean Video + Dynamic content? which sounds logical for Cisco to me.
#3 Comment By Johnny Carwash On 22 January 2011 @ 01:08 @089
Adobe + Cisco… Clueless meets arrogant. A match made in heaven. Good luck to the customers. Howard, get back on your meds.
#4 Comment By Jason Cremins On 22 January 2011 @ 09:12 @425
It will interesting to see the final specs for the player and whether it is restricted to H264 video and SWF files or whether it will support Adobe Air. If it supports Air then this would be a more interesting opportunity as the capabilities would be extensive and turn the device into an Open Standards based product that could be modified be software developers on a per project basis.
#5 Comment By David Wible On 22 January 2011 @ 15:41 @695
Industry Weapon’s newest version of CommandCenterHD supports the 4310 without limiting any of our clients’ functionality they receive from our other supported end points.
#6 Comment By Kent Boekenhauer On 24 January 2011 @ 13:41 @612
Why not confirm the capabilities of a product before throwing out bold statements? It would be like me saying “I heard that DOOH only publishes positive stories when they have a vested interest in that company, what do you think?”
#7 Comment By John Doe On 24 January 2011 @ 23:18 @013
Adrian, you must have a lot of free time because you certainly don’t do any research for your articles.
Use google and find the data sheet for the 4310. To save you some time, here are some highlights.
-Hardware Accelerated video up to 28Mbps. MPEG 1,2,4 (h.264) and WMV.
-Flash Lite 3.1, also hardware accelerated
-Lots of different types of content can be used because the layouts are just driven by flash which is dynamically built by the Design Tool software. Customers don’t need to know Flash.
-Power Over Ethernet