Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire 1 Mainstream; Helping Customers Deliver Outstanding TV Experiences to Any Device

In today’s rapidly evolving market, the lines continue to blur between PayTV, such as premium subscription content, and over-the-top (OTT) streaming video service offerings. Service providers, content providers, media companies and broadcasters are all launching services of their own. OTT is fast becoming the new normal, where open, cloud-based technologies allow innovation at a rate simply not possible with traditional TV technologies.

Today, we are pleased to announce our intent to acquire 1 Mainstream Inc., a privately held company that offers a cloud-based video platform designed to quickly launch live and on-demand OTT video services to a variety of connected devices. 1 Mainstream helps service providers, broadcasters, media companies and emerging digital content companies deliver their media content to almost any connected media device, from Apple TV to Microsoft Xbox.

1 Mainstream plays a key role in the OTT PayTV and media industry, sitting at the intersection between content and connected devices, and seamlessly moving content across connected devices. The company’s platform is widely used by major content providers and traditional service providers, to deliver their content across most of the video streaming platforms available today.

According to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index announced today, global cloud traffic will more than quadruple by the end of 2019. With the acquisition of 1 Mainstream, Cisco will enable our customers to leverage the cloud to deliver new services faster and accelerate their own TV services.

1 Mainstream’s technology complements Cisco’s new ‘Infinite’ suite of cloud-powered video entertainment solutions designed to help service providers, broadcasters and media companies to deliver outstanding TV experiences to multiple screens, utilizing one cloud, on any network. Today’s acquisition will enable service providers, broadcasters and media companies to make their entire channel lineup and content library available to their customers on the internet via their TV, tablet or connected devices, either within the home or on the go.

Acquisitions are a foundational element of Cisco’s build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop approach to innovation. 1 Mainstream represents the third acquisition announced by Cisco this week and highlights how we are applying our unique approach to innovation to capture key market disruptions in areas such as cloud (1 Mainstream), analytics (ParStream) and security (Lancope).

1 Mainstream will join our Service Provider Video Software and Solutions Cloud Engineering Group, under the leadership of Conrad Clemson, senior vice president and general manager. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the second quarter of Cisco’s current fiscal year.