Last October GridNetworks announced that it had raised $9.5M in Series A funding for its GridCasting content delivery network (CDN). For whatever reason, though, Cisco decided to wait until today to reveal that it was a strategic investor in that round.

GridNetworks wants to provide the underlying technology that streams high quality television content over the internet and into homes. Its architecture is part traditional CDN, part peer-to-peer network. In simple terms, the content delivered by GridCasting is initially buffered by a handful of data centers. Then after about 10-30 seconds of video playback, the data centers hand over delivery responsibilities to about 16 peers (other consumers of online video content who have cached it already and can serve as mini data centers themselves).

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