Entertainment Going Direct to a Domain Near You

Cisco Sparks a Media Flame
By Anders Bylund - Fool.com

Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) is blurring the line between network equipment and server systems. In the process, the company is moving media distributors and consumers one step closer to the "watch it anywhere, anytime, on any device" ideal. But it will take more than a clever network setup to reach that final destination. Entire industries need to change.

What's up?
The latest media processing beast out of Cisco's labs is the MXE 3000, a high-powered transcoding central that aims to take video in any format and deliver it to the end user in basically any other format. The translation between different media formats is supposed to be transparent to the consumer, highly automated and integrated into the network itself, and it's supposed to just work. And oh boy, video distributors need that kind of help today.

For example, I have this fancy Verizon (NYSE: VZ) FiOS service with a "media manager" DVR. It lets me record TV shows on one box (the DVR itself) and watch it on other digital cable boxes around the house. So far, so good -- Verizon controls the video format from the source to my screen, and it works. FULL