Sharing video across the network presents numerous operational challenges for enterprises, including incompatibility problems with newer media-ready devices, studio costs and turnaround for content, and limited support for video formats.
In order to mitigate the manual workflow process associated with media processing, enterprises often use traditional transcoders, only to find a different set of challenges that include the lack of adequate postproduction capabilities and the inability to distribute the processed content.
The Cisco® MXE 3000 Media Experience Engine addresses the limitations of traditional transcoders while offering you an automated procedure to produce and author content with studio-quality results (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Key components of the Cisco MXE 3000.
Enterprise customers have many options for positioning the Cisco MXE 3000 to overcome challenges in media processing. This document describes some typical uses.
Figure 2. Cisco MXE 3000 used for Corporate Training
Corporate Training
Training is one of the most widely implemented uses for the Cisco MXE 3000. Organizations spend millions of dollars a year on training costs, and the tendency now is to train through video.
Video is very effective for delivering detailed representations of concepts and topics, and trainees feel as if they are attending them live. You can process the Cisco MXE 3000 video to make the material more effective, and you can quickly transform media processed with this solution into different formats to allow trainers to easily reach a broad audience.
You can customize the training material to introduce speakers, add title slates, and insert smooth transitions. These techniques are ideal for introducing trainers, products, and concepts. The ability to combine sources that involve video with data (such as a Microsoft Office Word or PowerPoint file on a desktop) and present both sources in a single view is very useful for enterprise customers aiming to collaborate between teams or extend training to globally dispersed employees.
This capability is also useful in higher education, where you can distribute a lecturer's video and the corresponding whiteboard view from one location to multiple campuses. It also benefits collaboration between manufacturing plants in video format versus sending static photographs through email messages. And finally, it is useful in retail, where a presenter can highlight aspects of the product that are represented on the same screen.
Figure 3. Cisco MXE 3000 used for Corporate Communications
Corporate Communications
The ability to reach employees with critical concerns and corporate news has traditionally been a challenging task for organizations. Challenges stem from employees who use a diverse set of endpoints on which they consume content, timely availability of content, and the quality of the content being delivered.
Organizations are increasingly relying on video as a primary tool for distributing corporate communications to employees. When you consider the aforementioned challenges with video communications as the medium, the level of complexity is further heightened.
The Cisco MXE 3000 can help your organization meet these challenges by allowing you to push content to a broad set of devices. Furthermore, the solution can take advantage of the broader set of Cisco video solutions for content distribution. For example, the Cisco MXE 3000 can produce content and instantaneously push it out to Cisco Digital Signage displays, high-definition (HD) displays, personal computers (through Cisco Video Portal), Cisco Enterprise TV, and handheld devices.
Additionally, you can deliver the content in a timely manner because the Cisco MXE 3000 hardware delivers high-performance processing. The scalability it offers allows administrators to process multiple "jobs" in a batch-wise process and have all the content quickly available at the various endpoints. Finally, you can customize the content with the most appropriate set of graphics to complement the message.
Figure 4. Cisco MXE 3000 used for Desktop Video Publishing
Desktop Video Publishing
As video becomes more prevalent across the enterprise network, end users need to be assured an easy and intuitive experience when consuming the content. Lack of such an experience could translate to poor adoption of video as a communications medium.
Desktop video applications have struggled to deliver video content coherently because of their inability to properly catalogue, tag, and present the content. The Cisco MXE 3000 can catalogue chapters with automatically generated thumbnails - offering a crucial component of the overall workflow associated with desktop video publishing. This capability is delivered by the Cisco MXE 3000 scene change-detection feature, which detects transitions in a meeting. When a transition is detected, the application creates static thumbnails that you can later assign to chapters within the video content. The result is an intuitive layout of content that users can easily navigate. Figure 5 shows a pictorial representation of this feature.
Figure 5. Scene Change Detection Capabilities on the Cisco MXE 3000
Storage Optimization
As capital budgets shrink in today's ailing economy, IT administrators are burdened with storage requirements on the network. As organizations become more dependent on video, storage becomes a critical concern. Typically, IT administrators take traditional content and, over time, reduce the bit rate of the content so that it occupies less volume on network storage assets.
The Cisco MXE 3000 profile-based job administration allows IT administrators to effortlessly reduce the storage requirements of their content. They can simply drag and drop content into the Cisco MXE 3000 watch folder and the application then takes over. In a batch-wise manner, the application can process numerous jobs to reduce the size of the content while optimizing critical video parameters that affect the quality of lower-bit rate content.
Figure 6. Cisco MXE 3000 being used for Video Conferencing Applications
Video Conferencing Applications
In today's economic climate, organizations are relying more and more on video conferencing systems to collaborate across the world. This type of business collaboration also provides a "green" approach by minimizing travel. The Cisco MXE 3000 can take in different feeds from video conferencing systems and smoothly combine the view of two speakers on the same screen.
In addition, the insertion of customized graphics results in a processed piece of video footage that is of professional quality. Users can share slides that are juxtaposed with the speaker's view. They can play back the captured video conferencing files on a diverse set of devices, allowing for meeting participants who are in transit to participate in video conferencing meetings by viewing the content at a later time on their handheld devices. These capabilities reduce the underlying barrier for collaboration with video.
Figure 7. Cisco MXE 3000 being used to re-purpose video obtained from Video Surveillance systems
Video Surveillance
Organizations often rely on IP-based video surveillance systems to capture video footage of unauthorized activity. The Cisco MXE 3000 can process video surveillance feeds to enable you to watch footage from a variety of devices instead of being confined to a control room at the site where the video is captured. This scenario also facilitates 24-hour operations, because administrators can use a "follow-the-sun" model for monitoring activity acquired by their IP-based video surveillance systems.
Additionally, a combination of the scene change-detection feature coupled with the notification capabilities of the Cisco MXE 3000 allows for another interesting use case: You can tune the Cisco MXE 3000 scene-detection threshold so that it is very sensitive. Thus when a surveillance camera detects a change in the scene, a thumbnail can be generated dynamically and then sent through email to alert a security administrator. This feature is ideal for banks, retail, and other areas where video surveillance is normally deployed.
Finally, you can use the graphics package supported on the Cisco MXE 3000 to render graphics, such as time stamps and location information, on the video footage. Figure 8 shows how the process works.
Figure 8. Scene detection capabilities used in video surveillance applications by Cisco MXE 3000
In summary, the Cisco MXE 3000 Media Experience Engine can address the challenges of enterprise customers who increasingly depend on video for corporate training, corporate communications, video conferencing, and desktop video publication, by streamlining the process by which video can be authored, produced, transformed, and distributed across the network.