Harmonic Elevates ProMedia With HEVC and Ultra HD
Next-Generation Capabilities Increase Performance and Improve Integration to Monetize OTT Multiscreen Services
SAN JOSE, Calif.(07 Apr 2013)
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT), the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, today announced significant enhancements to its award-winning ProMedia suite of adaptive bit rate (ABR) solutions for multiscreen processing and delivery. New features include HEVC and Ultra HD support, increased synergy with the Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage system, and support for closed captioning, regional blackouts, and Nielsen ID3 tagging. Harmonic will demonstrate ProMedia suite's enhanced functionality at booth SU1411 during the 2013 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 8-11.
"ProMedia is the industry's most complete multiscreen preparation solution," said Krish Padmanabhan, senior vice president of products at Harmonic. "The latest enhancements to the product family arrive at the perfect time, as more broadcasters and service providers are looking to expand their portfolio with high-quality multiscreen services that scale and deliver amazing video. Harmonic customers now have the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency needed to accomplish this goal, drive new revenue streams, and improve the video experience."
Format Leadership
Harmonic led the market in implementing the new MPEG-DASH standard, powering the world's first large-scale, OTT multiscreen trial based on DASH for Belgian broadcaster VRT, and what's expected to be the first commercial DASH service for Spanish infrastructure telecom operator Abertis Telecom. The addition of HEVC and Ultra HD support to the ProMedia family continues that tradition of leadership. HEVC, which offers up to 50-percent better compression efficiency than H.264, helps alleviate bandwidth constraints and provides the ability to delivery higher resolution video to multiple screens, and will be demonstrated at the 2013 NAB Show on the ProMedia Live real-time and ProMedia Xpress file-based transcoders.
ProMedia Xpress also supports the emerging Ultra HD format for VOD applications. HEVC and AVC transcoding of Ultra HD on ProMedia Xpress takes advantage of Harmonic's MicroGrid™ parallel-computing technology to achieve remarkable transcoding speed. MicroGrid splits large processing tasks into multiple threads, each of which is completed concurrently, removing the bottlenecks associated with competing transcoding architectures. The technology enables Harmonic customers to unlock the bandwidth and video quality advantages of 4K and Ultra HD content in a timely and cost-effective manner, whether delivered via AVC or HEVC.
Enhanced Performance and Scalability
Harmonic's expertise in intelligent function integration is on display at the 2013 NAB Show with the bundling of the ProMedia Package stream preparation system with the ProMedia Origin streaming media server. Ideal for VOD and time-shift TV applications (e.g., start-over, catch-up, and nPVR), the combined package-origin solution maximizes the operator's cost savings, minimizes rackspace requirements, and simplifies the workflow.
Launch of OTT time-shift services is further optimized through improved synergy between ProMedia Origin and the MediaGrid shared-storage system. This combination enables independent scaling of both storage capacity and bandwidth, as well as streaming capability. As a service grows, an operator simply adds more ProMedia Origin servers; as their library grows, storage can be easily added with MediaGrid. This unmatched scalability is critical to the expansion of an operator's OTT service offerings and future business success.
Open Architecture Ensures Investment Protection
Leveraging powerful new Intel chipsets and other technology improvements, ProMedia applications support a number of new features that enable operators to monetize their investment and provide the best quality of experience, including extensive, flexible ABR closed captioning and subtitling implementation, ad insertion through event signaling and management (ESAM), Nielsen ID3 tagging, and regional blackout management. These comprehensive capabilities combine with ProMedia's established benefits to provide a feature-rich, extensible platform that works seamlessly with a variety of leading digital rights management systems, media asset management systems, and content distribution networks, in addition to other Harmonic products.
"The open nature of the ProMedia suite provides substantial investment protection while enabling customers to ride the Intel performance curve," continued Padmanabhan. "The applications are not tied to a closed or GPU-centric hardware infrastructure, so ProMedia customers can utilize their IT buying power to realize significant cost-savings when launching pay-TV multiscreen services. Providers can even virtualize their multiscreen transcoding and delivery infrastructure without compromising performance or video quality. These are just a few of the reasons why ProMedia customers around the world consider it to be the most open and comprehensive solution available for launching high-value OTT multiscreen services."
Further information about Harmonic and the company's products is available at www.harmonicinc.com.
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About Harmonic
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) is the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure for emerging television and video services. The company's production-ready innovation enables content and service providers to efficiently create, prepare, and deliver differentiated services for television and new media video platforms. More information is available at www.harmonicinc.com.