• Safety and security: For Panduit Corporation, more than 100 IP video surveillance cameras surround the perimeter and restricted areas, and authorized personnel can monitor live and archived video streams from any Web browser on a PC or smartphone. By delivering server capabilities to the network edge and integrating device and alert alarms with IP-based dispatch and incidence response, integrated video solutions help meet the increasing demands of public and private sector organizations to efficiently and effectively support threat mitigation, crisis collaboration, and situational awareness.
• Advertising: Crédit Agricole, a French retail banking group, utilizes "virtual expert" kiosks where customers seeking product advice can touch a button to connect to a customer service agent. When not in use, the kiosks can also display relevant ads, increasing cross-selling.
• Entertainment: JW Marriott Marquis hotel in Miami, Fla., features a 450-square-foot video wall that has the capability to display 25 separate images, one colossal image, or anything in between, adding to the excitement for fans.
Compared to deploying and managing separate networks for each use case, it is more efficient to build a single network with the intelligence to deliver an optimal user experience for all types of video and rich media -- without interfering with the performance of other applications operating over the same network. This type of architecture is called a medianet, an end-to-end architecture optimized for video and rich media and designed to help network operators and IT managers more effectively manage and deploy multiple video systems.
Not only does a medianet decrease long-term costs, it can also increase ROI by enabling multiple departments to use the same video endpoints and content for their own purposes. For example, a company that invests in a telepresence system for executive travel reduction can later use the telepresence room as a self-service recording studio.
Employees can just press a button on an IP phone to record high-definition video, and press another button to publish the video on a Web portal. Similarly, a retailer that deploys in-store video surveillance cameras to prevent shoplifting can take advantage of the medianet to provide access to real-time and archived video to the merchandising team, to study shopper behavior. A medianet architecture has three layers:
