Imagine standing in front of a crowd constituting a random cross-sample of the world population. You want to convey a single message that everyone can understand -but will your audience understand your language? Some might, but certainly not all. Some would pick up your message right away, others would have no idea what you wanted. And would you understand them? What if they had urgent information to transmit? What if they needed help but didn't know how to convey their needs to you?

The proliferation of video endpoint devices is good for the consumer but it can make life challenging for operators. Long used to managed set top boxes, operators now need to guarantee quality of service for a variety of unmanaged or partially managed devices (i.e. tablets, smart phones, connected TVs, etc.) that may not speak their language or play by their rules. They may need to pass information to and gather information from devices on siloed operating systems and in siloed ecosystems.

This is where Cisco's cloud-based Endpoint Management solution, part of the Videoscape Unified Control Plane portfolio, comes into play. It allows operators to gather from and distribute data to the most popular endpoint devices -from the managed STB to the unmanaged game console. Operators, for instance, may want to deliver a new feature, such as targeted advertising, or enforce a blackout restriction on content. With Endpoint Management, they can define a feature or alert once and propagate it to all devices that subscribers are using with the operators' services. This also works in the other direction: by accumulating diagnostic information quickly and easily, operators can identify and remedy issues before they spread, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

Key to this effort is Endpoint Management's geolocation service that allow operators to determine a device's physical location. This location data is aggregated and can be accessed from a single API. This technology enables operators to send geographic-based alerts, ads, billing information or other localized information based on customer location that can be sent to one or more user devices. With this flexible, cloud-based architecture, operators are empowered to scale their product offerings to new heights while minimizing operational expenses.

For more information about Cisco's Videoscape Endpoint Management solution, click here.

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