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optimisations – across the entire chain. the best video quality,” claims Rajeev Raman, news. Mom’s stream might need less bits, but Beginning with encoders at the headend, vice president of product management and still looks awesome. The saved bandwidth is where quality decisions can be made more strategy at Cisco. “Whether service providers then applied to making the sports stream on granular, and then on the network, where are delivering in fixed video delivery can be optimised for different or wireless mobile streaming services such as live and on networks, we apply demand. And finally, in the client, where the same principles intelligent decisions about requests for of understanding the content streams can lower costs and improve kind of content that is video quality. Existing approaches often look being requested from at a subset of technologies to make point the endpoints and optimisations. Intelligent optimisation knowing where those allows you to use primary insight about devices are in the the content, network conditions, and client network to perform requests. optimisations that “What sets us apart is that we use techniques to analyze the quality of video content at three different levels: the encoding level, the network level and the client level.” – Rajeev Raman enable video quality at scale.” Turning ideas into action One company that adopted this philosophy is Cisco. Realising that you cannot just grow Sounds good in theory. But what does it mean in a practical sense? “In a fixed bandwidth environment,” says Raman, “you could have a network with a lot of devices requesting content. We can help bandwidth down the same pipeline, Cisco service providers optimise how content is decided to focus on optimising bandwidth packaged and prepared for delivery because utilisation by using greater insight into we know the kind of content being encoded. the content being streamed and network And because we know that some content conditions in order to deliver video more requires higher bit rates than others, we can efficiently. optimise how it is encoded for streaming over “What sets us apart is that we use IP networks. With a large cluster of devices the big screen look and sound pristine. Everyone’s happy. That’s what delivering video quality at scale is all about. By getting better information from the encoding that says what content is available, service providers are empowered to make more quality-aware decisions. As a result, the client then makes a more intelligent decision to request that content. Bringing stellar video quality to multiple devices is the catalyst for several other benefits. Happier customers are loyal customers. And that means less money spent reducing churn. No doubt it would also positively affect the Net Promoter score mentioned earlier. Additionally, customers will pay more for your service because it is now clearly techniques to analyze the quality of video in a given area, we can also add or align more differentiated on a metric that matters to content at three different levels: the encoding fixed or mobile networking capacity to those them. You will have reached that holy grail of level, the network level and the client level. areas of the network that need it.” high-quality video on multiple devices. This visibility allows service providers to use bandwidth more efficiently while delivering So, at the client end, Dad could be watching the football game, while Mom watches the Best of all, Cisco, with its Infinite Video Platform, can help you achieve it. EUROMEDIA 21