Starting today, enterprise customers can get all the bandwidth for high-definition video they need from AT&T, which has launched a private content delivery service for video inside company firewalls. The explosion of video inside corporate networks is straining resources, according to the carrier. But unlike the tiered service that AT&T is experimenting with for its last-mile consumer networks, it’s offering enterprise customers a service that helps them track, compress and prioritize video traffic within the network.

AT&T explains pretty clearly why this is necessary in its release:

“On the average business day, about one-third of the more than 17 petabytes of traffic traversing AT&T’s global backbone network is video content. A mere three years ago, video content traversing the AT&T network produced barely a blip,” said Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of strategy and application services, AT&T Business Solutions.

AT&T, rather than become a dumb pipe that acts solely as a conduit for the video deluge, is hoping to monetize that video traffic. On the enterprise side, it’s offering products such as its AT&T Private Content Distribution Service for inside the firewall; it launched a content delivery network last summer that will likely tie into this offering by delivering content from outside, too. Other carriers such as Verizon, and even Internet backbone providers such as Level 3, have CDN efforts as well.

AT&T’s Private Content Distribution Service sounds like it may be based on, or is competitive to, Cisco’s media:net, which manages video within the corporation. That means Cisco has either scored a great client for its initial forays into managing corporate video, or its competition just got tougher, as many large enterprises would rather outsource such efforts than build their own.