blog：How Cisco hopes to channel the Internet video onslaught.

Last September, Cisco launched the ASR-9000, a router designed to give broadband carriers the ability to cache large video files at the edge of the Internet, where they can be more easily streamed to users–a trick that mirrors the Internet shortcuts offered by content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight. (See “Cisco Revs Up Video.”)

“In the ’90s, we talked about the information superhighway. Now it’s a media superhighway, and we’ve got to change the network to reflect that,” De Beer explains.

De Beer says his personal video epiphany came five years ago, when he saw his daughter using YouTube to shop for a replacement waterskiing tube during a family vacation. “I saw how these videos showed more in a few minutes than any number of product fact sheets on the Web,” he says. “That’s when I knew that video would fundamentally change the way we consume information.”