Communications giant Cisco announced it has completed its
acquisition of privately held Inlet Technologies, a provider of
Adaptive Bit Rate digital media processing platforms. Based in Raleigh,
N.C., Inlet was acquired to help strengthen the capabilities of Cisco's
Videoscape TV platform, allowing service and content providers to
deliver video experiences to a variety of devices over any Internet
Protocol (IP) network.
Cisco Videoscape is a TV platform for service providers that brings
together digital TV and online content with social media and
communications applications with the intention of creating an immersive
home and mobile video entertainment experience. Inlet's ABR technology,
which is used in streaming multimedia over managed and unmanaged
networks, adapts the quality of the video stream based on real-time
network conditions.
Cisco said in a statement that Inlet would bring to the company a
strong team that understands the complexities of delivering ABR video
over IP networks to any device. With the close of the acquisition,
Inlet employees become part of Cisco's Service Provider Video
Technology Group. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco paid
approximately $95 million in cash and retention-based incentives in
exchange for all shares of Inlet.
ABR technology works by detecting a user's bandwidth and CPU
capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of a video stream
accordingly. It requires the use of an encoder, which can encode a
single source video at multiple bit rates. The player client switches
between streaming the different encodings depending on available
resources.
For more, read the eWEEK article: Cisco Closes $95 Million Acquisition of Inlet Technologies.
