Cisco, the anti-BitTorrent

As router king Cisco moves deeper into the video world, you can be sure of one thing: John Chambers and Co. will do all they can to help network owners and content providers battle pirated material. In fact, after his keynote speech Tuesday, Chambers told us that security was a key differentiator between Cisco and other video-delivery technologies.

In talking to service providers and content creators, Chambers said, the difference is “they trust us — and maybe that’s not the same as with their other partners.” Chambers said that Cisco is “not ready to talk yet” about its full plans for protecting video content online, but that it is something it is already working on with network owners and content creators.

At a later-morning panel at Cisco’s analyst conference in San Jose, Mike Volpi, Cisco senior VP for the routing and service provider business, took a swipe at YouTube, saying that while the content on video-sharing sites is great, “there’s a lot of stolen music on those [user-created] videos. We [Cisco] want to make sure that the entertainment is there, but there’s no theft there.”

The pirates-overboard stance is not a surprise, given that Cisco currently makes shiploads of money selling secure networking gear to enterprises and service providers. The real challenge may be to build something as wide open as YouTube but as secure as your Comcast cable connection. Chambers’ quote about Cisco’s desire to be “the major company in IT and communications” is also applicable to the secure-video idea: “It’s not going to be built in the next year or two.”