[marcus0x62]

SA made set top boxes along with a bunch of back-end infrastructure to make them work. It was an acquisition that made sense on paper -- Cisco did (does) a lot of business with service providers, they make cable modem termination systems (the headend devices that handle cable modem connectivity,) had dabbled in IP video, so it was a natural evolution to make and sell the rest of the gear you'd need to operate a cable-based service provider. I don't think they were counting on how rapidly Internet streaming would take over, but in any case, the acquisition didn't work out so well and last I heard they had divested it.

One other thing that I think feeds into these acquisition mishaps is that Cisco has, in my opinion, consistently over-estimated how much intelligence would be needed (or wanted) in the core network. In their view, intelligent network services = expensive network devices = revenue for Cisco. I think what the Internet specifically and IP in general, as well as the evolution of LAN technologies over time have proven is that when it comes to the core network, simple is almost always better and intelligence should move to the edge, where innovation can happen quicker and where services can be implemented in software.

As an example, at one point they had what was, essentially, a middleware system (like Websphere,) which they called Application Oriented Networking. The idea was you would deploy these on your network gear, throughout your network, and it would provide message routing and translation services. They had a whole "architecture" built for it, called Services Oriented Network Architecture[0]. I don't think the people who built it really understood that it provided no real advantage over a cluster of middleware/ESB/MQ servers in a data center and that nobody was going to pay a huge premium to build that capability in their IP routers.

0 - https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/global/it_it/solutions/ent/tecno...

[drdec]

> I don't think they were counting on how rapidly Internet streaming would take over

Ironically, those set top makers were in a perfect position to take advantage of it. They could have been Roku - they already had huge market penetration.

[marcus0x62]

Sure, but those set top box manufacturers were beholden to the cable ISPs for their revenue, cable ISPs which would have been furious if a supplier started competing with them. The STB companies also, as a general rule, were really bad at UX -- there's a reason why the interface on those things was universally bad, and it's that the cable companies were the customer of the STB maker, not the end consumer. SA and the rest of them just didn't have consumer UX expertise as a real competency and didn't need to have it.

[TylerE]

I was thinking way earlier than that. My grandparents had a Scientific Atlanta box connected to their giant piece-of-furtniture Hughs and Mathis TV. This was late 80s, early 90s, long before digital TV, or cable having more than 30 or 40 channels.

[marcus0x62]

I believe they made equipment related to cable/satellite TV as far back as the 70s.

[biggerstep]

Yep. I worked at SA from the mid-90's through the mid '10's. They left the satellite business and focused (mostly) on cable systems. Was a lot of fun as digital settops rolled out, then DVR, then HDTV. As others have noted, the Cisco acquisition in 2006 did not, uh, work out too well. I believe Cisco had visions of video control "in the network", but that was never going to work for extant cable systems, and we couldn't get an IPTV solution going for lots of reasons. Loved my time at SA but it was oil and water with Cisco.