Comcast and Cisco Ride the Cloud

OpenStack Summit Demonstration Provides Sneak Peek into Future of Networking and TV

Content will always be king.  But soon, with powerful cloud technology, Pay TV customers will be sitting on the throne, whether they are on their couch, in the café, or on the bus.    

Late last month at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Comcast drew back the curtain on the future of television, demonstrating how cloud infrastructures can power exciting new TV experiences.

Mark Muehl, senior vice president of NE&TO product engineering and technology at Comcast, demonstrated the company’s flagship X1 cloud-based user interface, powered by an OpenStack cloud, during his keynote presentation.  Comcast and Cisco are working closely together to implement next-generation video services, like the X1 guide, on an OpenStack foundation, which enables both agility and scale.  

At Cisco we are “all-in” on OpenStack. We are investing heavily to make it the reliable, scalable, agile & feature-rich platform service providers need to deploy exciting new cloud-based video services.  Last month’s demonstration provided a sneak peek into the ongoing strategic collaboration between Comcast and Cisco in programmable networking. But it also illustrated a larger theme: cloud technologies, networking and applications are coming together in new and exciting ways. 

Video: Comcast’s Mark Muehl describes how Comcast is using OpenStack and shows the audience a live demo of its Xfinity service running on OpenStack.

Through Cisco’s Open Network Environment (ONE) initiative, we have the widest range of solutions in the industry that deliver an open and programmable network. Cisco ONE, which embraces OpenStack, software defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV), has dozens of active customers, including major service providers, massively scalable data centers, government organizations, and multiple Fortune-100 companies. 

Through our work with global service providers who see the potential of open, programmable networks, we are continuing to build the foundation for the next-generation Internet.  The new Internet will become a platform to enable new cloud-centered applications, such as cloud-based DVR, through which video subscribers can store their favorite content in the cloud and access it from any device, anywhere.

Cisco is very proud to be working with leading entertainment and technology leaders like Comcast, and we look forward to helping the Pay TV industry make the successful transition to standards-based cloud technology.

Share