Cisco to bring Flip camcorders to Australia by Xmas

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 14:27

IT Industry - Strategy

Cisco will be very firmly in the consumer electronic gadget market by year end when it introduces its Flip camcorders into the Australian market in time for Christmas.

Cisco earlier this year bought US company Pure Digital which manufactures and markets the Flip and which has sold over two million of the devices in the US market.

The Flip is an HD camcorder whose standout features are its small size, ease of use and the ease with which videos can be uploaded to a PC or Mac and thence to popular social networking sites like YouTube, or made accessible to individuals via email.

There are four models in the US - two high definition and two standard definition - ranging in price from $US150 to $US200. No information is presently available from Cisco as to which models will go on sale in Australia, or what the local pricing will be.

The Flip comes with a flip out USB connector and with the software for PC or Mac stored in the camera. It is charged via the USB port and when plugged into a computer for the first time, automatically installs the correct application.

Menu options make it extremely easy to upload the videos (in a reduced definition and reduced size format) to YouTube, Facebook or "other websites" or to send to an email address. In this case the recipient(s) receive an email with a URL to retrieve the video from a web page. However the fact that the video is uploaded to a website and not emailed directly is transparent to the sender.

When Cisco announced plans to acquire Pure Digital in March, Ned Hooper, senior vice president of Cisco's Corporate Development and Consumer Groups, said: "The acquisition of Pure Digital is key to Cisco's strategy to expand our momentum in the media-enabled home and to capture the consumer market transition to visual networking. This acquisition will take Cisco's consumer business to the next level as the company develops new video capabilities and drives the next generation of entertainment and communication experiences."

This video sharing capability appears to have been what attracted Cisco to the company as much as the Flip video devices themselves. Cisco has a strong vision of the future in which the network is "video aware" and able to route and switch video to and from multiple different sources, adapting it as needed for the end devices.

Kevin Bloch, CTO of Cisco Australia, told iTWire: "Cisco does not intend to make money just be selling these devices for a couple of hundred dollars each."

At Cisco Networkers in Brisbane this week Guido Jouret, CTO of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group staged a demonstration with a colleague in the US where video was input from Cisco Telepresence systems, competing similar products from other vendors, desktop conferencing products, a Flip camcorder and in iPhone and immediately output on to different platforms. He said that all the technology required to support converting the video between the different formats was commercially available from Cisco.

Stuart Corner attended Networkers as a guest of Cisco.