Cisco has completed its acquisition of privately held Inlet Technologies, which specializes in providing Adaptive Bit Rate digital media processing platforms. The deal closed for $95 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Inlet.
The acquisition of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company gives a little extra punch to Cisco's Videoscape TV platform, which the company is targeting toward service providers, and that converges digital TV and online content with social media and communications applications. Cisco sees the meshing of these various services as the future of home and mobile video entertainment experience. Inlet's advanced ABR technology, which is used in streaming multimedia over managed and unmanaged networks, adapts the quality of the video stream based on real-time network conditions.
Videoscape is an open platform that utilizes the cloud, the network, and client devices. In the home, its media gateway integrates voice, linear and online video, high-speed data, Wi-Fi and network traffic routing. An IP STB is engineered to support all video forms delivered to a TV, including pay TV, broadcast channels, premium channels, VoD and the Web.
Its cloud component relies on the Videoscape Media Suite to offer full life-cycle content management so that service providers can efficiently and cost-effectively manage and publish content across multiple screens.
"Videoscape, will allow access to any content from any device anywhere in the world with proper authorization," Cisco CEO John Chambers said at CES. It's also designed to seamlessly transition content from device-to-device. It will, he believes, "redefine the video experience."
Videoscape is just one part of a video ecosystem Cisco has aggressively been constructing.
Under the terms of the agreement, Inlet will become part of Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group, Cisco said.
For More:
- see this release
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