It is built into our business that many services get announced, and then the vendors that supplied the technology finally get permission to talk about their involvement, and they get to announce it once again. That’s exactly what’s happened this week with Telecom Italia’s Yalp service, a cross between iTunes, Hulu and YouTube, which went live in May in Italy.
Cicso and Adobe finally got leave to tell us that it was their technology at the heart of it, and suddenly the world’s blogs and news services are all announcing Yalp. But we can understand why, even though it has been out for a while, the idea that Cisco is running around Europe enabling Telecom Operator portals like this one, with live TV channels, VoD, both streamed and purchasable as downloads, music, and the creation of personalized TV channels, filled with UGC content, all built around Adobe Flash video and Flash Server, is cause for raising an eyebrow.
A quick review of the site, shows it is clean, the technology is good and the idea is highly copy-able across most of Europe, if not the rest of the world.
The technology was Cisco’s Content Delivery System with Internet Streaming (CDS-IS) with Adobe Flash streaming technology, straight form the portal, under the brand of Yalp!
Given that the Italian operator can use Flash to stream to any screen it makes the service a natural for any of the major European ISPs.
CDS is an implementation of Adobe Flash Media Server 3 and provides content and service routing, dynamic hierarchical caching, load balancing, failover protection, IP multicast extensions, unified management tools and end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) support on top of plain old Flash.