Cisco Systems announced its Entertainment Operating System (EOS), a portal to let content developers create communities around content and pay the host based on revenue collected from ads.

An excerpt from ITWorldCanada:

“It’s going to be the first play that bundles together three things that media companies need to make personalization work … The ability to create a Web community with blogs and other messaging capabilities, content distribution and an enrollment engine which can look at usage and make recommendations on the content to be delivered to each subscriber,” said Daniel Scheinman, senior vice-president and general manager of Cisco’s media solutions group.

Cisco also said that it was inspired by the results it obtained for deploying the service at Nascar and National Hockey League Web sites. Sports fans were allowed to join the community for singer Kid Rock. In fact, the community grew by 20,000 in just a month — hence the potential for a social networking platform for content developers.

The service is powered by two key acquisitions that Cisco made early this year: Tribe and Five Across.

Cisco will provide social networking features, distribution, and relevant targeting of content. The idea is that as communities grow on the specific topics, the relevant content will be made available to the users.

EOS is being seen as an experimental media distribution offering from Cisco. The elements of the equation seem to be right — a target audience for content creators and quality content for site users — but will this be a killer offering? Social networking sites could add a new feature that lets users have similar services.

Do you think Cisco’s Entertainment OS will be the next-generation entertainment experience or just targeted advertising?

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