Cisco’s Videoscape has been literally everything, both in a positioning sense and in its mission and component count. Operators griped about the fuzziness of the concept at the first announcement, but there are some signs that Cisco is starting to pull things together, and that could be significant for Cisco, as well as for a cloud-content story for the market.
The big problem with content projects has been the same problem that’s dogged Videoscape, in my view. Operators have just stuck too many things inside the “Content” project bin, and as a result they’ve totally failed to establish any holistic vision for it. The number of functional components in an operator content project has hovered in the 20-ish range, which is way too many components given that the most comprehensive commercial strategy couldn’t hit more than 70% of those boxes.
Cisco, who’s more often than not chasing sales rainbows with its strategies, opened up the nozzle on the Videoscape sprayer and blasted away at everything in sight, which resulted in Videoscape having no real architecture behind it. The latest Cisco video Unity strategy is attempting to fix that, but what’s hard to see is whether it’s a band-aid or some real suturing at the fundamentals level.
Unity appears to be a front-end that harmonizes video services from the buyers’ side, collecting disparate Cisco stuff into a common presentation framework. That’s a useful step, but it’s not a video architecture any more than a paint job is a new car. There is still an issue of an underlying architecture for content delivery, something that creates a true content cloud and not just the appearance of one.
One reason for the market confusion is the fact that we really have multiple video problems lumped into the content category. Users want channelized network TV in the usual way, delivered to their sets. Most of them, according to research I’ve seen and believe is accurate, want to supplement that with PC and increasingly tablet viewing, either in-home in parallel with TV (watching another program) or out-of-sync because they’re on the road/move. This is what’s taking things in a kind of network-DVR-ish direction. If TV Everywhere is flexible network DVR, then the user sets “record” and plays back on good old multi-screen.
But this is still a mission or a requirement and not an architecture. If we’re moving to cloud video, and of course to cloud-everything under operator initiatives like Network Functions Virtualization, then we need to be thinking about what kind of cloud we’re talking about. Is a content cloud or an NFV cloud a general IaaS cloud? Why would it be, given that it’s really not multi-tenant and it actually likely needs a lot of horizontal integration and composition. Cisco’s Unity proves that you need to draw on multiple cloud sources to create a cloud-content GUI. That’s not ships-in-the-night multi-tenant applications in action, it’s more like SOA.
Which is I think the key point. Is the service providers’ “service cloud of the future” really more like SOA, or at least like a more lightweight kind of hypervisor virtualization than we’re used to thinking about? Are “virtual networks” for carrier services going to have to include the ability to cross application boundaries to integrate experiences? If they can’t do that, then we’d need to create a complete cloud architecture for content and set its boundaries in a virtual network sense, confident that because we know it’s complete we know we don’t need to expand those boundaries. Does that sound like where we are? No way.
I think Cisco is showing us something, though. Videoscape is a work in progress, but it’s progressing. Tactical sales stimulation isn’t an efficient way to build an architectural model, but it may be a suitable way of dealing with a market that can’t make up its mind. Cisco could be building a pretty façade on Videoscape, but that doesn’t mean it WON’T do something behind the painted sets. Maybe even something useful.