Harmonic Lands NBC Olympics Sale

Harmonic Inc. has won a golden endorsement from NBC. The network’s Olympics division has elected Harmonic’s Omneon MediaGrid shared storage systems and its ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding software for its production of the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Harmonic President-CEO Patrick Harshman shared the news Saturday at a Las Vegas event timed for NAB that promoted three recent tech developments, including an announcement of an upgrade to its ProStream 1000 with ACE (an acronym for the Harmonic-coined Agile Compression Engine), equipped with multiscreen transcoding capability, with the ability to transcode up to 20 HD streams and 80 adaptive streaming profiles. The ProStream is also integrated with ProMedia file transcoders and MediaGrid storage system.

Tom Lattie, VP of product marketing, also discussed the ProView 7100, initially announced April 10.  Harmonic’s integrated receiver-decoder, which comes in a single rack unit, allows for transcoding, descrambling encrypted transported content, decoding multiple forms of video and processing streaming MPEG files.

Lattie also discussed the two-month-old ChannelPort integrated channel playout platform for Harmonic Spectrum media server systems, which allows for both master control switching and the ability to integrate graphics to reinforce channel branding.

“There’s a lot of pressure to take the cost out, to run more efficiently operationally,” Harshman said in an interview after the Harmonic presentation. “The network engineer is stretched more than ever before. So the extent you can make things seamless with the existing management structure … we think is a huge benefit.”

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