From The NAB Exhibit Floor: Harmonic

Harmonic | Booth SU1210 | Website: www.harmonicinc.com

Harmonic made a number of announcements Sunday at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Among them were:

Harmonic has launched two new VOS offerings powered by the cloud. An extension of Harmonic’s award-winning VOS software-based media processing platform, VOS Cloud is a media processing platform that enables content and service providers to manage the video production and delivery workflow for broadcast and OTT applications via standard IT hardware, over public or private cloud infrastructure. The second VOS offering, Harmonic’s VOS 360 professional cloud media processing service (www.vos360.tv), provides operators with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that is hosted in the public cloud and maintained and monitored by Harmonic, enabling customers to launch revenue-generating, broadcast-quality OTT services in a matter of minutes instead of months.

The VOS Cloud platform, which is currently in trials in various OpenStack and public cloud environments with leading service providers around the globe, provides operators with ultimate simplicity, efficiency and agility. Configuration, deployment and management is easy through VOS Cloud’s automated video formation technology, which uses standard IT deployment templates to simplify set-up and unlock powerful media processing and delivery workflows. By transforming traditional video preparation and delivery architectures into a hybrid cloud operation, VOS Cloud accelerates time to market for new broadcast and OTT services.

As one of the first professional grade, native cloud-based media processing services in the industry, VOS 360 is maintained and operated by Harmonic 24 hours a day, ensuring superior quality of experience and service availability at all times. Built upon leading public cloud infrastructure platforms, the VOS 360 service makes it easy to prepare and deliver content from anywhere in the world, with total geographic redundancy and operational resiliency.

Through capabilities such as time-shift TV, VOD and cloud DVR, both VOS cloud offerings enable service providers to generate instant revenue, without the traditional CAPEX involved with building, maintaining and operating a new headend or data center. Pay-as-you-go pricing for both offerings allows service providers to realize ROI in the shortest time possible.

Encoding and transcoding functionality on the new VOS cloud offerings is powered by the Harmonic PURE Compression Engine™, which provides support for a wide range of formats, codecs and encoding schemes to enable broadcast-quality video at low bitrates. MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC codecs are offered, as are SD, HD and UHD content formats for broadcast, cable, satellite and IPTV delivery — including constant, variable and adaptive bitrate streaming.

Harmonic is offering a free 30-day trial of the VOS 360 service to all customers. For more information on VOS 360 visit www.vos360.tv. At the 2016 NAB Show, Harmonic will provide a live demonstration of VOS Cloud platform and the VOS 360 service in booth SU1210.

NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage system and Spectrum MediaDeck integrated media servers for its production of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Aug. 5-21.

NBC Olympics will use the multiple Harmonic solutions in its most critical  production areas: in 10 global locations covering the event for broadcast, on demand, digital, news operations, and long term archive. This wide-area production model facilitates cost-effective content creation by helping NBC Olympics maintain a portion of its operation in the United States.

During the Rio Games, Harmonic infrastructure and production solutions, which are already well-established at NBC Olympics’ Stamford, Conn., facility, will operate with systems installed at the NBC Olympics production compound within the International Broadcast Center in Rio to enable NBC Olympics to offer high volumes of timely content on multiple television channels. Incorporating MediaGrid ContentStore 5840 high-density storage nodes, the Harmonic MediaGrid system will provide centralized shared storage that packs tremendous bandwidth and capacity into a nearly 70 percent smaller footprint than alternatives, delivering significant cost savings on equivalent storage capacity. The MediaDeck server systems will facilitate on-the-fly capture and proxy generation for all incoming materials.

Harmonic MediaDeck media servers will simultaneously record as many as 60 incoming venue feeds as both XDCAM-HD at 50 Mbps and H.264 low-resolution proxy. These systems also will give NBC Olympics personnel at the Stamford facility independent control over 60 additional channels of local ingest. Each recording’s proxy will be replicated in near real time on a 960-TB Harmonic MediaGrid storage system connected via two 10-Gigabit circuits to a second 920-TB MediaGrid installed at the Stamford facility. In less than a minute, content created on the Rio MediaGrid system will be replicated on the Stamford MediaGrid system.

Spanish-language KWHY Los Angeles has deployed a comprehensive solution from Harmonic to broaden its channel lineup. Using Harmonic’s Electra X2 advanced media processors, ProStream 9100 high-density stream processors and NMX Digital Service Manager video network management application, provided by Harmonic platinum reseller Heartland Video Systems, the station has successfully added additional SD subchannels to its original HD channel offering. The Harmonic solution features a scalable architecture, the latest technologies for statistical multiplexing, and ATSC 3.0 support.

Harmonic announced new capabilities for its ViBE 4K encoder that deliver Ultra HD low-latency, high-bitrate HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit encoding for 4K contribution applications. The ViBE 4K encoder is one of several solutions that have joined the Harmonic product family as a result of the company’s recent acquisition of Thomson Video Networks.

By reducing encoder latency to less than a second, and increasing maximum encoding bitrate to 160 Mbps, the ViBE 4K encoder addresses key latency and picture fidelity requirements for contribution applications. In addition to excellent picture quality, customers need to retain maximum color information and facilitate editing and master archiving of received content. With its full-frame, full-GOP, 4:2:2 10-bit implementation, the ViBE 4K encoder is an ideal solution for delivering artifact-free pictures when compared to UHD contribution solutions that rely on multiple encoders, along with uniform rendering of single-texture areas such as the grass on a soccer field.

The new contribution capabilities for the ViBE 4K encoder will be available in June.

Harmonic has released its next-generation media-storage platform, the Harmonic MediaGrid 4000 shared storage solution. The high-performance scale-out storage system increases storage density to 24 6-TB drives in a 4-RU chassis, and delivers the performance of a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) with the simplicity and scalability of Ethernet-based network-attached storage (NAS). Capable of supporting every stage in diverse media workflows, including production of live sports, news and entertainment in HD and 4K/Ultra HD, the Harmonic MediaGrid 4000 system enables superior workflow efficiency and productivity through storage consolidation and on-the-fly scaling of capacity and bandwidth.

There are two members of the new MediaGrid product family. Offering twice the performance of MediaGrid 3000 system components, a 50-percent increase in storage capacity and double the number of 10-Gb Ethernet ports, the MediaGrid ContentServer 4000 elevates the capabilities and throughput of base MediaGrid systems to their highest level yet. Storage capacity can be expanded incrementally by 48, 96 or 144 TB by adding MediaGrid ContentStore 4240 nodes outfitted with 24 hot-swappable 2-TB, 4-TB or 6-TB SAS drives. ContentStore 5840 nodes can also be added to MediaGrid 4000 systems for the highest storage density in the industry — up to 504 TB in 5 RU.

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