Is Sun Setting On Purpose-Built Products?

The days of adding just another black box to accomplish an essential broadcast task like ingest, graphics overlay, digital effects processing or playout may be numbered.

At least that’s how Harmonic sees the world and is positioning itself for a near-term future in which a “virtualized” broadcast infrastructure runs via software on blade servers that can be scaled up or down to meet the demands at hand.

On April 5 the company announced Harmonic VOS, a software platform for television production and distribution that leverages the company’s existing intellectual property for a future in which virtual machines replace purpose-built hardware.

VOS, which Peter Alexander, Harmonic SVP-chief marketing officer, said is not an acronym, encompasses all broadcast tasks from ingest to delivery.

It grew out of a desire by the company’s customers to reduce capital expenditures as well as realize operational savings by aligning the broadcast workflow with a more generic IT skillset, said Krish Padmanabhan, Harmonic SVP of video products. “VOS is designed to run on an elastic IT infrastructure with full capabilities,” he said.

At the press conference, the company announced Electra VXM, its first product to incorporate VOS functions, including the company’s Pure compression engine, playout, graphics, packaging and delivery. It operates in data center envrionments on OpenStack or VMware vSphere.

Electra VXM is available immediately. A variety of purchase and licensing agreements are available, according to the company.

“By moving to this kind of infrastructure and re-rendering our intellectual property, we are creating new product categories,” said Patrick Harshman, Harmonic CEO-president.