BNI Video sells a hosted control plane offering that helps ISPs quickly turn up new online video services. It handles entitlement, billing and quality of service necessary to do so, and it packages those services together in a platform that can interact with service providers’ own billing and entitlements systems. This is particularly helpful for service providers that were formed through the combination of a number of legacy systems acquired over years of consolidation.

The acquisition is the latest of many purchases Cisco has made to bolster its Videoscape portfolio. It bought white-label online video distributor ExtendMedia last year, and earlier in 2011 it acquired video encoding firm Inlet Technologies. The BNI Video acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s second fiscal quarter, which ends in Jan. 2012.

BNI Video raised $16 million in a round of financing that closed last October. Investors in the startup included Cisco, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, in addition to Castile Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

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BNI Video’s control plane is designed to help cable companies and other pay TV service providers as they transition their video services to all-IP networks. It takes all of the pieces required to deliver content to end users — including all of the transcoding, digital rights management, quality of service, etc. — and packages it together in a hosted platform that can then interface with service providers’ own billing and entitlements systems. The hosted nature of the product will enable companies like Comcast — which is an amalgam of various cable systems that have been rolled up over the course of several decades of consolidation — to offer new services across all of those various systems, regardless of the legacy infrastructure behind it.

Because the platform acts as a hosted service, BNI Video’s offering isn’t subject to the long upgrade process typically required when cable companies want to add new features to their video offerings. For instance, adding advanced search and navigational features will be easier and could provide a much-needed upgrade to the decades-old grid navigation system that is common in most pay TV providers’ electronic programming guides. It will also could enable them to roll out new social features more quickly.

So far, the story is resonating with cable providers, CEO Conrad Clemson said in a phone interview: The company already has one deployment with a Tier 1 operator, and is in multiple field trials with others.

BNI Video’s round also included participation from Charles River Ventures and Castile Ventures. The company, which is based in Boxborough, Mass., has 50 employees worldwide, including a 35-man engineering team in China.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user comedy_nose.

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