Cisco announced today that Numericable, France's leading cable operator, is delivering highly advanced, on-demand entertainment services to French consumers using the Cisco® Content Delivery System (CDS). Numericable can now offer its customers the most advanced video services, including catch-up TV services, access to a catalogue of more than 7,000 programs and movies, high-definition videos on demand and NumeriSPACE, an innovative service for user-generated content (UGC). With video traffic forecast to account for 90 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2012 (1) , the scalability of the Cisco CDS will help ensure that Numericable can increase its video delivery capacity whilst optimizing networking costs and maintaining a consistent quality of experience for its 3.5 million TV customers and one million Internet customers.

Today's announcement demonstrates the steps Numericable is taking to evolve their network into a medianet , a network optimized for rich media, offering the consumer differentiated experiences with robust broadband connectivity. With solutions like Cisco CDS, Numericable can optimize the scalability, performance and user experience of rich media, especially video. Cisco CDS combined with Quative's service delivery platform (SDP), allows Numericable subscribers to browse and make purchases from the extensive video-on-demand catalogue using a remote control. Numericable's innovative NumeriSPACE service brings media sharing and social networking to both Web and TV, using Cisco CDS integrated with applications from Eyeka and supported by the Quative SDP. Numericable launched NumeriSPACE in December, where subscribers can share, view and manipulate high-quality UGC photos and videos (uploaded on their computers) from their TVs via the set-top box.

"Numericable's delivery of video and entertainment content must be reliable, and accessible and meet the changing needs of consumers," comments Philippe Le May, chief technology officer at Numericable. "In order to offer our customers the best home entertainment service, we needed to enhance our video-on-demand solution and ensure that we can deliver a world-class experience. Cisco has created a future-proof and dynamic platform that will allow us to expand our customer base and add new services quickly, cost effectively and without compromising on quality."

"Consumers now expect more from their home entertainment packages," said Laurent Blanchard, managing director at Cisco France. "Numericable has taken its customers' requirements on board and has reinvented the viewers' experience with more choice, personalized content and new opportunities to enjoy social networking through their TV sets. Cisco's CDS has the flexibility and scalability to help Numericable to offer these new visual networking services, embracing user-generated content and value-added video and music entertainment."

The Cisco Advanced Services team played a key role in this project, designing, implementing and integrating the Numericable CDS solution, including third-party applications. Cisco CDS operates on the Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture and incorporates medianet technologies for delivering video to digital televisions and set-top boxes as well as distributing video, voice, music and data to a wide range of IP-enabled consumer devices such as personal computers and mobile phones. The hierarchical content and distribution architecture of the Cisco CDS reduces network traffic overhead to minimize the overall cost of ownership of the network.

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)

Numericable