SVG Sit-Down: Cisco's Bryan Bedford on Providing End-to-End Support for Clients, How Industry Trends Impact Workflows New venues, production partners deploy various pieces of the Cisco ecosystem By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor Thursday, April 17, 2025 - 7:00 am
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From reliable dependability and routing that power IP-based facilities to full network connectivity and security, ensuring seamless and smooth productions, Cisco has developed a thorough and overarching portfolio of solutions to serve sports-video production. The digital-communications-tech company's work in sports has continued to grow over the years, deployed at such venues as SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome in Los Angeles and for major tentpole events like the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and the U.S. Open.
During NAB 2025, Cisco Industry Sales Director Bryan Bedford sat down with SVG to explain what the company aimed to accomplish there, how its wide array of services and relationships with systems integrators involve Cisco in new sports venues across the country, and what the impact of artificial intelligence and other industry trends will be on the in-person fan experience.
What overall message or philosophy is driving Cisco's presence on the show floor?
We have a renewed commitment to this industry every year. Certainly, the move to a SMPTE 2110 network or some sort of cloud workflow is top of mind for everybody. Those [topics] are near and dear to us, but our presence is to show how we connect everything together end to end. Whether it's a truck, a broadcast facility, or a control room inside of a stadium, we want to make sure that they're looking at the entire picture. That means core converged networks and high-density Wi-Fi for stadiums and connectivity and SMPTE 2110 deployments for broadcast. We also are dealing with digital signage and our VisionEdge product, so we're considering the security and observability for the platforms that support that.
Cisco presented new ideas and workflows at its NAB 2025 booth in the LVCC's West Hall.
We also have a number of new products that are being showcased this year. We're showing innovation around network assurance and understanding predictability for things that happen inside all these production areas, both onsite and through remote production.
We're introducing new technology around cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, but it all comes back to our renewed end-to-end scope. From service providers and telecommunication partners to systems integrators to partners within our ecosystem, broadcast as a service, telco partner, systems integrator, ecosystem partner, we want to see how they all work together with our tools and technologies that help solve business problems for their customers.
What are some recent control-room builds that Cisco was a part of? How is the company leveraging relationships with systems integrators to market end-to-end solutions?
We're at the point now where we're seeing half a dozen to a dozen new construction builds in North America. We've been involved with Diversified's work with the Seattle Mariners at their control room in T-Mobile Park, ES Broadcast's work with the Atlanta Falcons at their control room in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, as well as SMU's new control room that opened in Fall 2024. We're able to team up with the systems integrators to get our gear in those spaces. We're ubiquitous in the market, so we win our fair share of projects. We're continuing to build off what we installed last year at Intuit Dome. That venue is a model for how we approach our projects: since customers don't necessarily want bespoke partners for certain aspects of a build, we consolidate vendor selection for them. We're able to make the process so much simpler because we can take eight to 10 categories [on at once] instead of having them piece everything together themselves
In the venue market, every team is coming to us about how we can help them save on cost and operationalize their building because they don't have large IT or broadcast teams. Through our platforms and business strategy, we believe, we can do those things.
What industry trends are currently impacting your business, and what might impact it in the future?
I think there are some trends relative to broadcast, but, inside sports venues, there are some broader trends that aren't necessarily broadcast-specific. There's a big effort around frictional commerce. [For example,] at Intuit Dome, there are 45 frictionless commerce stations.
You're also going to see some more things that we're working on that will impact edge workflows in AI, because, right now, there's not enough processing at the edge since it's all at the data center. We're also doing things at the edge on the compute side that will be very transformational. That will impact trucks, broadcast environments, and inside the stadium. Since we're the digital infrastructure that everybody's building off of, technologies that we're working on will become the new platforms that everybody builds on and innovates from.
On the SMPTE 2110 side, we [as an industry] are nowhere close to being at the top at this point. I think we're working our way up on the bell curve, so we're still a year or two away. We've certainly had our early adopters, but the ecosystem is still not fully matured on the edge on all those devices and applications. We're 85%-90% there, but there are still workflows that I think need to happen.
We've also seen, over the last year or two, that everyone has made the jump to the cloud, but I think that's coming back to the center of costs. Everyone is still figuring out what they need on-prem and what can be used in a hybr
