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A Medianet is an Intelligent Network Optimized for Rich Media.

Traditional IP networks are not well equipped to deal with interactive and real-time requirements, making delivery and quality of media unpredictable and increasing complexity for the network operators and managers. Networking technology is evolving to enable optimization for rich media, evolving current IP networks to medianets.

A medianet is media-, endpoint-, and network-aware, ensuring an optimal quality of the total experience while automating many aspects of configuration and optimization. A medianet can format video to best match the characteristics of the end device. It detects traffic conditions and ensures proper transmission of all the needed streams, and it recognizes the types of media going over the network and makes sure that they are properly created, sent, and delivered.

Interactive video has the most stringent network requirements. A network capable of supporting interactive video can easily handle the less-demanding requirements for the delivery of voice and data. The medianet represents the evolution of converged IP networks. This evolution consists of adding new medianet technologies, which are services added to existing devices as well as new classes of devices. Services are added to routers, switches, and rich-media endpoints. The medianet technologies deliver the media-, endpoint-, and network-aware capabilities that conventional IP networks lack. Video applications are raising new requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency, and jitter. The network is uniquely positioned to understand the source and destination of video streams as well as the ever-changing capacity characteristics of the connection.

A medianet can therefore apply the necessary media transformations (transcoding) as well as change media and signal encoding to adapt to changing network conditions. A medianet helps enable a new degree of interoperability between previously incompatible video endpoints while ensuring a consistent and optimal quality of experience.