At that time it launched two types of encoder for creating content: a Digital Media Manager appliance running the Video Portal Module software for ingesting, scheduling, and publishing it, and the Video Portal itself, for end users to browse, search, and view the content on their desktops. Collectively it refers to the portfolio as the Cisco Digital Media System.
Today’s additions, which take the San Jose, California-based company into the digital signage space, are the Digital Signage Module for the same DMM and the Digital Media Player, which is the box that attaches to the actual display screens at the other end of the network.
Thomas Wyatt, the company’s director and general manager of digital media management, said Cisco will also announce a partnership for a joint go-to-market with Japan’s NEC Corp, which is ranked by some analysts as the leader in the display market, though he said the Cisco products will work with any standard LCD or plasma screen.
Cisco is targeting four markets. First is sales and marketing/customer satisfaction, where the displays are aimed at an external public, out of the corporate HQ to transmit sales promotions and may even carry ads from a company’s partners to generate additional revenue. Second is the corporate comms space, where displays can target external or internal audiences. Third is training, again for both types of public, and fourth is information-sharing, particularly in the hospitality market, enabling for instance, hotels and convention centers to publish where particular events are being held.
Cisco signaled its intentions in digital signage at the beginning of this month with the acquisition of Tivella, whose Piccolo box has been integrated into the DMP, while its admin server is now part of DSM. The underlying logic for this move is that digital signage will drive more traffic over the IP networks that are its lifeblood. Equally, with both the digital signage and digital video markets characterized by fragmentation, with lots of regional players and start-ups, it feels it can lend the credibility of a global brand and $30bn of annual revenues to attract more global multinational customers to use the technology.
By delivering both technologies as software on the same appliance hardware (known generically within Cisco as the Media Convergence Server), it can offer lower cost of ownership and the convenience of both disciplines from a single device. In terms of pricing, the DMP has a US list price of $1,490, while the DMM has a base price for the appliance, with software licensing depending on how many DMPs it is managing. Wyatt said there is no published limit to the number of DMPs connected to a single DMM, but said Cisco already has customers running hundreds. He said a single DMM to support 50 displays in 10 locations would cost, with the DMPs, about $150,000.
