Cisco at the 2015 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo

It’s Expo Eve down here in New Orleans, where the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center will soon fill with the technology people of the cable and broadband industry. Us included!

We’ve been planning for months for this year’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, and are appreciably stocked (I hope!) with all of the elements that multichannel video providers (MVPDs) need to satiate their capacity needs — and contribute to the industry’s overall industrial momentum.

If you’re not going, or not familiar with the cable/broadband industry’s biggest and most hard-core tech event — the short hand is that it’s all about the distribution transition to ‘all-IP’ (Internet Protocol), and especially IP video. That’s because IP video will represent nearly 80% of all Internet traffic within three years, according to our latest VNI forecast. Much of that traffic transits the broadband networks of our MVPD partners, which means they’re girding for Gigabit speeds and an agile, elastic, virtualized and all-IP network.

On the capacity front, and optically, we’ll be showcasing our work to help customers take fiber deeper. For the HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) plant, we’ll be there with our award-winning cBR-8 Evolved CCAP router, designed to blend broadcast/linear, VOD and switched video, over the new bandwidth balm that is DOCSIS 3.1. And no conversation about capacity can really happen these days without a mention of WiFi. We’re proud to say we lead the market and we have a portfolio to match. In New Orleans we are showing our Meraki managed WiFi line, which is garnering an exciting amount of support in the service provider community.

On the video front we are all about the cloud! Last month at IBC we introduced our Infinite Solutions cloud video line. Definitely come by and see our Infinite Home and Infinite Video solutions. Infinite Home is an open, agile, and end-to-end way to brew your own multi-screen video offering, including all the bells and whistles – cloud DVR, TV Everywhere, recommendations and more. Infinite Video uses the same cloud but is tuned to delivering video to unmanaged consumer devices in the home and beyond. It lets us do the heavy lifting for you – we offer it “as a service” and we can turn up a classy, competitive multiscreen offering in 90 days! We will also feature our Virtualized Video Processing “V2P” solutions for the entire video workflow, consolidating multiple separate headend infrastructures into a unified, virtualized solution.

Security is on everyone’s minds this year, and we will of course showcase our stellar lineup of security solutions to protect video content in the data center prior to distribution, and after it reaches consumers’ homes, in addition to enterprise-level web and email security.

Looking through our Expo speaker list this year — we are clearly a bunch of DOCSIS and IP video junkies! No fewer than eight of us are leading workshops this year — Conrad Clemson, John Downey, John Holobinko, Ron Hranac (who himself is an Expo legend — the volume of ribbons hanging from his badge nearly reaches the floor every year!), Sangeeta Ramakrishnan, Pawel Sowinski, Edmond Shapiro, and Gerry White. The shortened version of the topics to be delivered range from “How to Squeeze 10 Pounds of Stuff (DOCSIS 3.1 & IP Video Traffic Engineering) Into a 5 Pound Bag,” to “Distributed CCAP Architectures: Breaking Up is Hard to Do.”

There’s more, there’s so much more…Come find us in booth #2634, or in the workshops, or at the IP Challenge and Reception, Tuesday evening! (5:30-7:30, Room 355.) See you in New Orleans!

Follow the hashtags, #SCTEexpo & #IPChallenge on Twitter and tweet us @CiscoSPVideo if you have any questions or comments.