Five years ago this week… Synamedia unveiled something of an oxymoron by announcing a virtual headend in a box for the Anga Com 2019 cable show—merging two products that had been around for a couple of years. Two years prior in 2017, Swisscom became one of the first operators to virtualize its headend as part of a wider migration from legacy appliances to COTS hardware. Headend in a box also appeared around that period, to save costs as part of the trend towards unified headends and COTS hardware for processing—with Malaysia’s Arcana’a an early example using Ateme software in 2016. Synamedia inherited elements of both from its Cisco heritage—notably its virtualized Digital Content Manager, which it was merging with its then five-year-old cloud CDN. The…