Written By George Tupy, Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Video

For TV service providers, one of the key promises of cloud architectures is the ability to innovate at Internet speeds. This enables a host of business outcomes, including new experiences which can be delivered and monetized more rapidly.

Beyond the speed of innovation, a key question -actually aspiration -that we often hear from our service provider customers is "how can I bringmoreinnovation into my TV environment." At Cisco Live in San Francisco this week, we have been able to share with our customers and partners how a transformation to cloud operating models, with Cisco's Videoscape Cloud Services, can help increase the quantity of TV service innovation.

Two key obstacles to innovation are risk and uncertainty. You can never be certain that a new enhancement in feature/functionality will stick and be widely adopted by your subscribers. And you face the risk of lost investment in failed innovations. With Videoscape Cloud Services,we can help our TV service provider customers to innovate more safely, by providing a "cloud sandbox for video."

So what's in this sandbox?

• First, Videoscape Cloud Services takes the same Videoscape functionality and open APIs and makes them available in a cloud hosted model -operated by Cisco and purchased by service providers on a consumption-based model, reducing both cost and risk.
• Second -we provide a series of initial cloud services capabilities to help service providers start quickly and enhance their existing TV services. We have chosen initial cloud services capabilities that can easily integrate with existing headend components and provide immediate value.
• Third, Videoscape Cloud Services may be provisioned and used independently, or they may be wired together when they are provisioned to combine capabilities.

As a result, Videoscape Cloud Services enables our customers to rapidly enhance existing TV services with compelling new experiences, test or trial new functionality, and only pay for what they use.

Below are a few of the Videoscape Cloud Services capabilities discussed at Cisco Live:

• Enriched metadata services which enable you to enhance content experiences by incorporating 3^rdparty content sources into the TV experience. For example, integrating metadata to associate and deliver contextual content from Wikipedia, or improving content discovery by integrating your existing guides with 3^rdparty recommendation engines.
• Contextual advertising services which extracts broadcast metadata to generate advertising opportunities and deliver relevant ads and promotions to second screens.
• Identity services which associate user profiles and content services to enable single sign on and social network integration, so that you can authenticate, share and view recommendations from social networks such as Facebook.
• Analytics services which can provide deeper insight into your subscribers' viewing behavior, improve audience profiling, and enable you to conduct A-B testing on sample audiences to test the impact of new features before broad implementation.

We have multiple customers actively discovering how much more they can innovate once the cost and risk is reduced thanks to Videoscape Cloud Services. Here's a brief video of TV Globo who extended viewer engagement and increased viewership for their Voice Brazil program by using Videoscape Cloud Services to introduce new gamification experiences.