Cisco reportedly has announced that France-based cable operator Numericable is delivering advanced, on-demand entertainment services to French consumers using the Cisco (News - Alert) Content Delivery System.

 

This latest announcement helps Numericable offer customers advanced video services. According to company officials, those services include catch-up TV services, access to a catalogue of more than 7,000 programs and movies, high-definition videos on demand and NumeriSPACE, a service for user-generated content.

 

“Cisco’s CDS has the flexibility and scalability to help Numericable offer these new visual networking services, embracing user-generated content and value-added video and music entertainment,” said Laurent Blanchard, managing director at Cisco France.

 

Operating on the Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network architecture, Cisco CDS incorporates medianet technologies for delivering video to digital televisions and set-top boxes. Plus, it distributes video, voice, music and data to a wide range of IP-enabled consumer devices such as personal computers and mobile phones.

 

According to industry forecast, the video traffic is expected to account for nearly 90 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2012. With the scalability of Cisco CDS, Numericable believes that it can increase its video delivery capacity.

 

In addition, the company expects to optimize networking costs and maintaining a consistent quality of experience for its 3.5 million TV customers and one million Internet customers.

 

Officials said that this announcement demonstrates the steps Numericable is taking to evolve their network into a medianet, a network optimized for rich media.

 

Using solutions such as Cisco CDS, Numericable is able to optimize the scalability, performance and user experience of rich media, especially video. Officials said that combined with Quative’s service delivery platform, Cisco CDS allows Numericable subscribers to browse and make purchases from video-on-demand catalogue using a remote control.

 

Additionally, with the help of Cisco CDS integrated with applications from Eyeka and supported by the Quative SDP, Numericable’s NumeriSPACE service brings media sharing and social networking to both Web and TV.

 

Philippe Le May, chief technology officer at Numericable, said that in order to offer customers the best home entertainment service, company needed to enhance its video-on-demand solution and ensure that we can deliver a world-class experience.

 

“Cisco has created a future-proof and dynamic platform that will allow us to expand our customer base and add new services quickly, cost effectively and without compromising on quality,” he said.

 

The Cisco Advanced Services team played a key role in this project. The team designed, implemented and integrated the Numericable CDS solution, including third-party applications.