It’s not often that stories centering around consumer grade hardware generate a lot of buzz here at SiliconANGLE.  After all, there are a lot of gadgets out there, and let’s face it, we tend to be pretty cloud-centric most of the time.  T

hat being said, there are exceptions to the rule.   Sometimes all that needs to happen for this exception to occur is the idea that a company that is synonymous with infrastructure in enterprise might be dipping its sizeable toe in an already cluttered market-space, and that happened when Cisco teased the possibility of releasing a set-top box.

[box type=”info”]Happy Holidays! The SiliconANGLE news and editorial team came to a group decision: we wanted a few days off for the holidays. Since very little in the way of tech news is going to be happening over the next few days (and you’ll still be looking for content to voraciously consume), we’d round out the biggest stories of the year in an ongoing series called “What You Missed Living Under Your Rock During 2010.” For the rest of the series, go here. Want more detail about the stories discussed here?  Don’t forget click through on all the links.

Happy Holidays from SiliconANGLE!

Editor-in-Chief Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins[/box]

This ball stated rolling when John Furrier reported:

According to multiple sources Cisco is preparing to announce on March 9^th a massive vision for a land grab dubbed “changing the future of the Internet”.

Rumors on Cisco’s announcement from many industry sources are all driving in the same direction.  Cisco appears to be announcing an end-to-end network play.  I’ve heard several different things either will be announced individually or collectively as one big “grand” vision.

Here is what appears to be breaking next week:

1. An “AppleTV” style cable set top or edge consumer box based on their Scientific Atlanta technology
2. Partnerships with service providers for ultra high speed access to the home
3. 100 Gigabit Ethernet on their Routers
4. Content and content delivery offering including lower end telepresence integration with possible content deals
5. A new vision that integrates the pieces above as owning the vision of the Internet touted as a “grand vision.”

It’s mainly a consumer play for Cisco, but it seems to touch on other markets: 1) consumer, 2) access, 3) edge, 4) core network, and 4) content provider and possibly low end telepresence.

Cisco will be touting the combination or all of the above to be a “complete overhaul” of the existing Internet in a broad “end to end” announcement that would “forever change” its shape and purpose.

Two core messages seem to be coming:

1. Cisco is the future of the internet and that they have support from service providers for high speed networking and web 2.0 apps, and …
2. Complete rip and replace all their old gear for new Cisco end to end hardware.

Sounds sort of cool, right?  Well it didn’t turn out to be as cool as we thought it might when John posted his follow-up four days later:

As reported on Friday I was reporting a huge announcement from Cisco that was dubbed “The Internet will change forever” hype. If you want to track the live blogging of the announcement go here from Scott Raynovich. It was the general opinion of all journalists that this made Cisco look bad for overhyping this announcement.  TelecomTV was very critical of this overhype.

I reported five major elements that Cisco was going to announce an end-to-end network play which would either will be announced individually or collectively as one big “grand” vision.

In light of what they announced, all I can say is “Three out of five ain’t bad.”

Three out of my five predictions were correct. Two big missing pieces from my report: No killer AppleTV style set top box and no content delivery offering with telepresence. Not sure if they got pulled from the announcement given how underwhelming the actual presentation was from the hype.

I guess my idea of changing the Internet forever was different than what was announced by Cisco.

Here is the summary of the announcement

– CRS-1 Product Announcement
– Service Provider endorsement with AT&T
– Grand vision and architecture play for end-to-end Cisco solution

Cisco did not announce a set top box or content distribution solution with telepresence. However, John Chambers did push on multiple occasions the notion that video is the killer app and highlighted rich media examples through his pitch.

For example, Chambers briefly hand waved over some key areas that we were hearing: media streams, 3dTV/HD, smartphones, tablets, telepresence, and gaming.

Then a few months later, just for good measure, SiliconAngle’s “BMOC,” Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins offered his take on the situation, which was spurred by a piece at GigaOM:

The answer is in the acquisitions. Nearly every expansion of Cisco’s consumer footprint comes from acquisition, which is how they choose to innovate. Last week during the VMworld, Cisco bought ExtendMedia for $80 million with very little fanfare or notice.

It has been a long-running Silicon Valley rumor that Cisco plans on rolling out a set-top box any day now. We were getting strong messaging just before their March press event this year that indicate thusly, but of all the anonymous tips we got, it turned out to be one of the only unsubstantiated news tip in the bunch.

I don’t expect Cisco to make a play direct to consumers in the way Boxee, Roku, Google and Apple are. It simply isn’t their style. The deal to acquire ExtendMedia makes much more sense – it’s a low risk solution to acquire the technology already in place with DVR’s controlled by CableCos and Telcos, and given trends in operator-owned IPTV, the fundamental network differences between their solutions and ones offered by more well known brands are slim, and will make very little difference to the consumer.

For those looking to see what Cisco’s play in this market, stop watching for a consumer facing device, and look to see how aggressively they utilize the tech and market position from the ExtendMedia purchase.

Now, in spite of all this, Cisco did make a consumer play, though not exactly for the same spot in the living room.

A little more than a week after Mark weighed in Kit Dotson told us when Cisco began to plug consumer based “telepresence” devices on it’s website, complete with functionality overviews:

The networking-giant Cisco has made a strange move recently in their announcement that they will be offering technologically elegant telepresence devices to the home consumer. This seems a little odd to me because don’t we essentially already have that for anyone who happens to own a computer with a built in webcam or a cell phone with a forward-facing camera.

Cisco seems to be angling to provide a sort of SciFi video-telephone system that uses a television set with a set-top camera to facilitate calls. It also touts itself as running with HD, no-frills out-of-the-box setup, and distinct elements of ease of use. The HD and call quality are designed to directly compete against services such as Skype which also offer a sort of telepresence with handheld devices and computer webcams.

There’s a lot of speculation right now on the end cost of the device but it looks like it could go as low as $200 (which would be heavily subsidized by Cisco) and several sources believe that it will run around $500. It looks like if Cisco wants to beak into the home networking environment the cheaper version will be much more enticing to consumers.

Right off of Cisco’s page on the upcoming product:

With Cisco TelePresence:

• Scheduling is easy-no IT support required
• Launching a meeting is as simple as making a phone call.
• In-room controls are intuitive – collaboration applications are plug and play
• Participants can meet in many rooms at once-up to 48 locations in one meeting
• Users can easily bring in collaboration applications like Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• Existing SD or HD videoconferencing systems can be easily integrated.

This chain of events can show you just how quickly things can spin out of control in the rumor-hungry tech world, and this was over something as simple as a provider-controlled TV box.  Imagine what would happen if it was something really big. Something even bigger than Mike Arrington’s jowls.

I dunno, maybe a giant sex scandal or something. Man, that would be cool.