10/28/2010 -- As it now stands, the proverbial revolution will not be televised.

In all likelihood, it will be streamed -- over IP networks.

With its medianet push, Cisco Systems Inc. hopes to play a big role in this streaming future. And with this week's announcement of a beefed-up Media Experience Engine (MXE) 5600, Cisco claims that it's upping the medianet ante.

Cisco says its new MXE 5600 can perform on-the-fly transcoding of media, converting it from one format to another, depending on the requirements or capabilities of a specific endpoint device or application.

Cisco also touted integration between Cisco Show and Share and its MXE 3500 device, and likewise promised to support integration between its Cisco Pulse media services and the MXE 3500 by July of next year.

Other new medianet entries include the Digital Media Player 4310 (a device that serves up rich media content to digital signs and displays) and the Cisco Media Services Interface. The latter offering acts as an interface between applications and networks -- and vice-versa -- providing both with visibility into one another.

Why the rush into media? For a variety of reasons, Cisco officials say, cultural change is nigh. "Enterprises are starting to adopt all types of video usage to significantly increase worker productivity, improve collaboration, reduce costs, move towards Green IT by reducing their carbon footprint, streamline and optimize business operations," notes Ulrica de Fort-Menares, director of product management with Cisco's Network Software and System Technology Group, on her company blog. "Adding new video services radically changes the demands on the network," de Fort-Menares continued. "Video consumes significantly more bandwidth than voice so over-provisioning in the network to avoid resource contention problems is not a viable option. Also, the requirement is not simply about the bandwidth, it is about rich service capabilities that must be enabled in the network... There is a need for the network to be aware and respond to the needs of a range of media and network applications."

Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technologies business group, says the transition to pervasive video is already taking place.

"There is a significant market transition under way as organizations prepare for pervasive video use," said De Beer, in a prepared release. "Not only does video mean huge productivity savings and a richer experience, but it also opens the door to change the way we work, live and learn," De Beer continued. "With the advent of pervasive video, we're solving the same issues today that we solved during Cisco's early days. Rather than determining how to share information between disparate computers systems, we've just figured out how to share rich media between dissimilar endpoints and media formats."
--By Stephen Swoyer