With a digital stereo, Cisco is starting a push into home electronics

The dominant provider of the digital pipes that run the Internet is making a big play in digital entertainment.
The New York Times

The story "With a digital stereo, Cisco is starting a push into home electronics" published December 29, 2008 at 11:27 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[zelmoziggy]

You said "[Cisco's] Scientific Atlanta unit sells set-top boxes through pay-TV companies, such as a video recorder offered as part of AT&T's Uverse television service."

I'm pretty sure that the U-Verse DVR is made by Motorola.

[Raiger6]

The front of all three of my U-Verse boxes say Cisco. Turn them over and the label says Scientific-Atlanta. Bring on the video conferencing!

[bakedpatato]

Linksys, and now this?

[ovidiucp]

They probably face an uphill battle, since they need to convince content providers to make their content available in a format they can sell. They'd need to do the equivalent of what Apple and Amazon have done for music, and Netflix has done for movies. Apple managed to do what it did because of their brand name, but Cisco? Regular consumers never heard of Cisco, so it's unlikely they will pull this off.

On a different note, even now media companies think of digital content as another way to sell music/videos. They will still charge you full price each time you buy the same music on LP, CD, digital AAC/MP3. The same holds true for the same movie that you bought on VHS or DVD and would like to get on BluRay or in a digital format. I don't see how I'd be able to get to my music if I forgot my iPod at home, since they'd more than likely want me to pay again to have access to that content. The best way to do this is to run a server in my house to give me access to my music, but few people would do this.

Further proof of how brain dead is the current situation is to look at how music cannot be shared in a household. With 4 people in my house, each with his/her own computer, if I buy some music from iTunes Music Store, there is no easy way for the other family members to put it on their iPods. iTunes does not provide such a feature, so I have to resort to rsync and shell scripts to synchronize the libraries on all the computers. But this leads to wasted space and other complications. Lots of people must be in this situation, yet nobody complains as if this is normal.

My bet? Cisco will have a hard time to make a dent. They're not known for user friendly software and nicely polished software to appeal people.

[cohaver]

Home entertainment need a broadband kick in the you know what. RIAA mite make a little more money off this Area and Leave the end user alone . Retailers mite get more bang for the Advertisement Dollar . And the True Smart home mite be seen before i die of old age. I'm All for better products and New Ideas
Cisco . Take a look at Mythbuntu http://www.mythbuntu.org add theses Cisco video Telephony and Hardware