The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) confirms much of what we already know: Service providers will need to carry more video traffic to more devices delivered as unique on-demand streams. All at the time and place of the end-user's choosing.

But the sheer scale of this demand makes interesting reading. The Cisco VNI projects that by 2017, the global Internet will reach nearly half (48%) the world's population, each with roughly five devices and machine-to-machine connections. Together, they will drive a total of 93 exabytes of internet traffic per month. Significantly, Internet video will make up two thirds of this Internet traffic, 65% of which will be carried over content delivery networks (CDN).

And it's not only Internet video.

Cisco VNI also projects that by 2017, video on-demand (VOD) traffic will nearly triple as it reaches 400 million global subscribers.

The bottom line is that service providers need to deal with unprecedented scale requirements with ever greater capabilities to manage and monitor their CDNs.

The question, of course, ishow?

At Cisco, we've been working with our service provider customers to implement their own CDNs, so they can reduce transport costs, preserve the highest quality experiences, and open up new monetization opportunities. We built our Videoscape Distribution Suite (VDS) to help our service providers customers meet the challenges of more traffic, more screens, and more on-demand viewing. Now, we are continuing to advance our technical leadership by taking server-based virtualization implementations of our VDS platform, and enabling them to operate as a cloud-based architecture. At our recent Cisco Live event in Milan we showed our customers and partners how a Cisco cloud-based CDN architecture gives them agility to respond to emerging and dynamic market requirements and the flexibility to interoperate with other private and public CDNs.

We could not have gotten to this place alone.

We've been fortunate to work with so many of the world's service providers, meeting their needs today and building for tomorrow's requirements. In fact, our Videoscape Distribution Suite (VDS) now boasts over 50 global customers including leading telco, cable and satellite operators worldwide.

In Europe, four out of the five largest telco operators power their CDNs with Cisco VDS. We are partnering with customers, such as Deutsche Telekom, to evolve their existing content delivery services and stay on the leading edge. VDS is powering Deutsche Telekom's TV Everywhere service "Entertain to go" in Germany, delivering premium content to PCs and mobile devices. We also notched an industry milestone by implementing the first IPV6 CDN in Europe with one of Deutsche Telekom's operating subsidiaries.

In North America, nine of the ten largest cable MSOs rely on our VDS to drive their video on demand and time-shifted traffic. We've built industry leadership and learning with our North American partners -helping us surpass a global milestone of supporting more than 4 million MPEG-2 TS streams of live, on-demand and time-shifted video content. In fact, our global VDS installed capacity surpasses 18 Tb/s. That equates to roughly 50,000 high-res 10 minute YouTube video clips per second.

So thank you to our customers who have shown their confidence in Cisco and our VDS solution.

And thank you to our Cisco teams for delivering the global capabilities that power superior video experiences.