NAB News: Cisco, Microsoft, Fusion-io

The 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference is underway this week in Las Vegas and several technology companies have had announcements made from the event.

Cisco to provide IP Networks to NBC for London Olympics.  Cisco (CSCO) announced it will collaborate with NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, to help deliver 17 consecutive days of coverage of the London Games from July 27 to August 12, 2012. Outside of using Cisco networking equipment NBC will use the Cisco Videoscape TV services delivery platform. Cisco will help NBC's Olympics division deploy a single converged IP infrastructure for a wide range of services, from the video delivery to data-intensive logistics applications. The combined vendor solution will enable real-time shot selection and editing of the London Games content by NBC's Olympics division staff in multiple locations. "Cisco helped us exceed our goals in Vancouver and Beijing, delivering thousands of hours of Games coverage to multiple screens via all-IP networked video technology," said Craig Lau, Vice President, Information Technology, NBC Olympics.  "We look forward to London, where we expect to once again lean on Cisco for their IP and video systems expertise to reach viewers on more devices."

Microsoft announces Media Services cloud platform.  Microsoft (MSFT) announced new media services and guidance to enable content providers and customers to realize the power of cloud computing. A new Broadcast Reference Architecture was published that offers prescriptive guidance on how media companies can architect their solutions to improve systems performance management as they move toward the cloud. The new cloud-based Windows Azure Media Services gives content providers and media partners the nearly unlimited capacity of the cloud to cost-effectively handle a huge volume of digital media and make it available in the format that customers want, when they want it. Microsoft is working with Akamai and deltatre to deliver high-definition streaming video of the London 2012 Olympic Games across multiple countries through major rights holders in Europe, North America, Central America and South America. “Our internal research shows that more than one-third of today’s Internet traffic is devoted to video consumption, and we expect that to grow to 80 percent by the end of 2015,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Windows Azure application platform. “Not everyone has the expertise or capital required to build a media infrastructure, so Windows Azure Media Services enables companies everywhere to build custom media solutions that easily scale and adapt to meet consumers’ needs, wherever or however they consume it.”

Adobe software optimized by Fusion-io.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that the upcoming release of Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium, Adobe’s powerful new generation of post-production software, is optimized to work with Fusion’s new ioFX workstation products. Based on the Fusion ioMemory platform, the Fusion ioFX is a new flash-based workstation memory tier for production professionals that connects via the host’s PCI Express bus. “Thanks to Global Performance Cache and the Fusion ioFX, After Effects users can experience a faster, more responsive workflow, ” said Steve Forde, After Effects product manager, Adobe Systems Incorporated.  “The Fusion ioFX memory tier provides the high throughput needed to manipulate all digital content in Adobe Creative Suite 6 for real-time content creation such as image editing and compositing as well as boosts video playback, encoding and transcoding, and other data-intensive activities.”