Telecom Italia brings video to Web using Cisco CDS

Telecom Italia today announced the launch of a Web-based video service delivering live and on-demand streaming content, based on Cisco’s CDS platform embedded with Adobe Flash Media Server. The announcement is the latest movement of a telecom service provider to offer its own content delivery network offering, in this case on a network-based platform able to also support video offerings to the television set and mobile phone, as well as the PC.

“Telecom Italia is launching a Web-based TV service to complement their IPTV offering,” said Murali Nemani, Director, Service Provider Video Marketing for Cisco. “This is a two-screen kind of offering that allows the consumer to either watch the content or record it to watch later on their schedule.”

The Telecom Italia Yalp! Offering (that’s ‘play’ backwards) will feature both rich streaming media content both live and on-demand, as well as community TV options that let consumers upload and share their own video content. Longer-term, it will offer an 80-channel lineup.

As NBC learned during the Olympics, viewers will use online viewing to complement their TV watching, giving service providers a new way to monetize their video offerings and create differentiated services, Nemani said. “During the Olympics, viewers on NBC.com could choose which of 44 venues to watch on their time, on whichever device they wanted to watch it,” Nemani said. “Consumers dictated this massive movement to watching highly personalized content. This online content absolutely complemented what they were doing on broadcast. NBC had unparalleled numbers – $1 billion in advertising from eight days alone. Consumers are moving the market to multiple devices and making content available on complementary devices and screens is absolutely where service providers are headed.”