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Cisco Digital Media Suite: Comprehensive: Learn, Grow, Communicate, and Collaborate

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Executive Summary

The Cisco® Digital Media Suite is a comprehensive offering of social video, digital signage, and IPTV systems that can help transform how organizations learn, grow, communicate, and collaborate. Support from the broad Cisco partner ecosystem of deployment, solution-development, and content-creation partners helps ensure a successful digital media implementation.

Transform Your Organization with Digital Media

Today, digital media is the most compelling platform to instantly and effectively reach customers, employees, partners, and students with important information, news, training, and events; it is effective because it preserves characteristics of face-to-face communication and brings both intimacy and immediacy to communications.
Studies show that people are far more likely to engage and retain information they can both see and hear. With digital media, it is possible to absorb and easily remember large amounts of often complicated information. And digital media is versatile; it draws viewers in whether the content is marketing, internal communications, training, advertising, or entertainment materials. More and more organizations are using digital media to deliver timely and targeted communications-it is creating a new kind of customer experience and facilitating business transformation.

The Challenge

Organizations of all sizes increasingly strive to improve external and internal communications in order to retain customers, compete, and grow their business globally.
With digital media, organizations can provide direct, relevant communications, and create richer and more satisfying experiences for both customers and end users-ultimately accelerating business transformation across many aspects of the business.
However, until now, deploying digital media has typically required complex integrations of individual components from multiple-often small-vendors, resulting in high total cost of ownership and limited scalability. Additionally, organizations have faced challenges with content management, network integration and content distribution, and tools that are too difficult for business users to operate.
These concerns point to the need for an integrated offering that can handle creation, management, and publishing content to digital displays and the desktop, while also flexibly supporting standard formats for live and on-demand content publishing.

The Solution: The Cisco Digital Media Suite

The Cisco Digital Media Suite is a highlight of Cisco innovation, building on the company's history and expertise in video and networking. It allows organizations to use high-quality, dynamic digital media to easily connect customers, employees, partners, and students anywhere, anytime.
The Cisco Digital Media Suite extends digital media to new, compelling applications for real-time and on-demand communications with flexible digital media creation, management, and publishing of content in various formats to multiple devices.
With the Cisco Digital Media Suite, organizations across all industries can increase sales, enhance customer experience, and facilitate learning.
For example, financial services organizations can:

• Improve customer experience by providing relevant marketing content, news, and information to customers waiting in branch-office locations

• Use the network to full advantage to accelerate product and services introductions

• Use digital signs for before- and after-hours training to improve sales productivity and efficiency

• Enhance and extend the influence of executive and corporate communications on our culture

Retailers can use digital media to reach customers with targeted marketing and promotions on digital signs at point-of-purchase locations to accelerate sales, throughout the store to improve in-store customer experience and satisfaction, and through the web. In addition, the cost of marketing programs can be reduced compared to traditional signage based on physical media.
Educational institutions can extend the learning environment by delivering on-demand lectures and materials to desktops and live broadcasts to classrooms and dorm rooms. They also can provide schedules, news, emergency messaging, and relevant information on digital signs around campus.
Other industries that are also rapidly adopting the Cisco Digital Media Suite include government, healthcare, sports and entertainment, safety and security, and transportation.

Cisco Digital Media Suite Business Benefits

With the Cisco Digital Media Suite, organizations can:

• Learn: They can provide training to employees, customers, and partners while saving money on travel costs, in addition to providing classroom alternatives, reaching geographically dispersed students, and enabling project-based learning.

• Grow: They can expand revenue opportunities with product promotion and advertising opportunities.

• Communicate: Video is now secure and easy to create, search, and share, making it an easy, scalable, and cost-effective form of communication.

• Collaborate: Information sharing through video and digital media across organizations increases productivity, accelerates time to market, facilites faster decision making, and promotes sharing of expertise.

A Comprehensive Suite of Business Video Systems

• The Cisco Digital Media Suite can help transform how organizations learn, grow, communicate, and collaborate:

• Cisco Digital Signs is a network-based digital signage system that helps organizations enhance customer experience, deliver communication and training, and accelerate sales.

• Cisco Cast is a business IPTV system that delivers live and on-demand video and broadcast TV channels over IP to digital screens.

• Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organizations create secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connections among customers, employees, and students with user-generated content.

An Integrated Product Portfolio

The Cisco Digital Media Suite (Figure 1) allows you to create, manage, and access content for these applications from a single platform:

• Content creation with Cisco Digital Media Encoders (DMEs): The Cisco Digital Media Encoders capture and digitize media from a variety of inputs into a variety of digital formats for live and on-demand delivery across an IP network, along with monitoring functions. The Cisco Digital Media Encoder 2000 is a dual-input studio-level encoder, whereas the Cisco Digital Media Encoder 1000 is single-channel portable encoder that allows organizations to capture and stream video outside of the studio.

• Management with the Cisco Digital Media Manager (DMM): This web-based centralized media-management application allows both business and IT users to remotely perform management tasks based on roles for Cisco Digital Signs, Cisco Cast, and Cisco Show and Share. The Cisco DMM provides flexible tools for content managers to manage content assets and approval flows, create playlists, and schedule instant and future content playback. Content managers also can manage Q&A sessions for live desktop video broadcasts and synchronize slides for both live events and video on demand (VoD). The DMM allows content designers to customize Cisco Digital Signs screen layouts and brand the Cisco Show and Share interface. IT users can remotely configure, manage, and monitor the network of Cisco Digital Signs.

• Content publishing to Cisco Digital Media Players (DMPs): The Cisco Digital Media Manager publishes content to and manages networked Cisco DMPs. Cisco DMPs are highly reliable IP-based hardware endpoints that enable Cisco Digital Signs and Cisco Cast by playing high-definition live and on-demand video, motion graphics, web, and dynamic content on digital displays for Cisco Digital Signs and Cisco Cast. The DMP hardware options include support for standard- and high-definition (SD and HD, respectively), MPEG2 and MPEG4/H.264, Flash, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and other web content formats and dynamic data.

• Access through Cisco Show and Share: This social video system allows users to browse, search, and view digital media interactively at their desktop. Features include secure login and access to user-specific content, video playlists, keyword search and program guide, full-screen video playback, slide synchronization alongside video, question submission with live webcasts, video sharing, and detailed content and user access reporting. It supports established video formats such as Windows Media, Flash, and MPEG4/H.264.

Figure 1. Cisco Digital Media Suite

Architecture

The Cisco Digital Media Suite employs the underlying network as a platform in combination with Cisco Wide Area Application Engines (WAEs) to automatically and reliably distribute and stream digital media content. Running the Cisco Digital Media Suite with Cisco Application and Content Networking System (ACNS) Software on Cisco WAEs provides optimal, secure performance. The Cisco Digital Media Suite complements the inherent performance, quality-of-service, and traffic-management capabilities of the underlying network to:

• Support both live unicast and multicast streaming services

• Provide on-demand access to video and audio files cached locally for viewing at LAN speeds

• Reduce video bandwidth to minimize its effect on network traffic

• Prioritize, secure, and separate video traffic over the network to help ensure optimized viewing

• Efficiently distribute video to a large and dispersed user base

• Manage and protect video assets on the network

A Broad Partner Ecosystem

The Cisco Digital Media Suite offers a broad partner ecosystem that provides deployment, solution-development, and content-creation partners to support a successful digital media implementation.

• Focused partner community: These trained channel partners and systems integrators are specialized in Cisco Digital Media Suite deployments.

• Solution-development partners: These partners continue to develop integrated solutions to further extend the capabilities of the Cisco Digital Media Suite for applications such as meeting-room, interactive, and event-based signage.

• Content-development partners: A global qualification program, the Cisco Academy of Digital Signage (http://www.cisco.com/go/dms/ads) trains media professionals how to plan, create, design, and optimize content for digital signage networks-creating a pool of Cisco qualified content-development partners.

Service and Support

Cisco and our partners provide a broad portfolio of intelligent, personalized services and support that can help you realize the full value of your video investment, increase business agility and network availability. This portfolio of services drives business transformation through a network-based collaboration platform that enables business to collaborate anywhere, anytime. For more information about these services, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/services/digitalmedia.

For More Information

For more information about the Cisco Digital Media Suite, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/dms or contact your local Cisco account representative.