And the (Two!) Technology & Engineering Emmys Go To….

By Jeff Seebeck, VP/GM, Video Control Plane Business Unit,Cisco

…Cisco! As you can imagine, this super-charged our annual trek to Las Vegas for the International CES show, which serves as host for the fanciest-ever black tie event for tech people. (It even had a tech host – David Pogue, himself an  Emmy award winning tech columnist for the New York Times.  Cool.)

This year marked the 64th time the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ put on its annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, and on the evening of January 10th, I was glad to be amongst my friends and colleagues to accept two, count’em two, Emmys.

One was for our work with our colleagues at Time Warner Cable on multi-room DVR, under the Emmy category that is, well, “pioneering development of multi-room DVR.” Being able to pause a show on one TV in the home, then pick it up again on another screen, is something lots of us take for granted — here in the year 2013.

But there was a time, about a decade ago, when DVRs were a one-screen-at-a-time thing. Next in that realm is cloud-based and network-based DVR, where we’re very (very) active. Why: Because people these days want to watch video inside their homes, and outside their homes.

The second Emmy went to our Power Vu content delivery and DCM (Digital Content Manager) Series product lines, in the Emmy category that is “the development and commercialization for digital infrastructure for local cable ad insertion.” It is the combination of the PowerVu and Digital Content Manager products, working in concert between separate companies and locations, which enable programmers and cable operators to cooperate on local advertisement insertion. Our system ensures that cable advertisements are put in the program at the right time, and that these ads do not play over the programmer’s reserved national advertisements, or even worse, the program itself.

Local cable ad insertion is a $9.8 billion dollar industry, today, and that’s largely because of the work to automate the business. Cisco’s innovations allowed our customers’ business models to evolve into a much stronger business proposition at higher revenue levels.

Saying we’re thrilled to be recognized this year in two of 11 categories of Technology & Engineering Emmys is the understatement of the year! Of course, we’d like to thank The Academy, but also the men and women technologists and engineers who built these two products, and took them to market. Well done!

In closing – we couldn’t possibly do an Emmy blog without showing the gold, gleaming beauty of the statues and hearing from our team on what was involved. Click on either of the links below to watch a short video on the two different Emmy wins.