Today, the company enables the delivery of amazing video experiences through its commitment to superior innovation, world-class service and compelling total cost of ownership (TCO). Harmonic video infrastructure solutions power everything from HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) compression of Ultra HD video, to blazing-fast transcoding of over-thetop (OTT) video content, to high-speed data, video and voice delivery via innovative cable edge systems. From terrestrial broadcast, cable and satellite delivery to adaptive bitrate streaming, Harmonic solutions simplify workflows and give content creators, broadcasters and service providers the power to deliver superior-quality digital video in real time and on demand, to every type of screen.
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Innovation has been Harmonic’s hallmark from the start. The first products shipped by Harmonic brought fiber optics to the cable industry, and the company’s subsequent innovations supported various transmission technologies. By 1999 Harmonic had expanded into video encoding technology, which it refined and leveraged over time to facilitate the industry’s migration from analog to digital and from SD to all variety of formats. The following year Harmonic began its history of IP innovation with the launch of the industry’s first IP edgeQAM solution, and just two years later it introduced the first all-IP TV headend and all-AVC headend. Continuing its launch of industry-first solutions, Harmonic released the Ion in 2004, the first broadcast encoder equipped only with an IP output. The next year Harmonic put itself at the forefront of adoption of IP-based interfacing in compressed headends, which enabled broadcast interfaces such as MPEG transport stream over ASI to be replaced by more commonplace IP interfacing, in turn paving the way for all-IP infrastructure and virtualization of the media delivery chain. The same year Harmonic launched the industry’s first multichannel, multiservice HD H.264 encoder. The acquisition of Entone’s F O R
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VOD unit brought video-on-demand and asset solutions into the technology mix. An Emmy® Award win in 2007 recognized the use of Harmonic’s Ion encoding technology by Time Warner Cable to generate IP-based ingest streams. The same year, the acquisition of Rhozet added high-speed universal transcoding technology into the Harmonic portfolio. The company’s introduction of FLEX® technology, incorporated into its Electra and Ion products, enabled the universal video/audio decoding necessary to support the all-IP headend. The subsequent acquisition of Scopus brought Harmonic valuable contribution and distribution technology. Harmonic’s further refinement of stream processing solutions yielded the first IP headend in a box, with integrated multiplexing, scrambling and transcoding. By 2010, Harmonic ProStream® stream processing technology had been deployed to power Comcast Media Center’s nationwide all-IP platform for content distribution. The acquisition of Omneon in 2010 fueled further innovation in high-speed workflows, as well as the gamechanging strategy of broadcast function integration. The Spectrum family of
Harmonic’s early and consistent focus on forward-looking media technology helped the company to earn further awards, including a 2012 Emmy Award that recognized the company’s development and commercialization of (IP-based) digital infrastructure for local cable ad insertion. A third Technology and Engineering Emmy Award win in 2015 honored the company’s achievements in IP-based closed-loop statistical multiplexing of geographically distributed encoders, made possible with its DiviTrackIP™ statmux technology. In the intervening years, Harmonic demonstrated its industry leadership by powering the first public DASH trial at the 2012 London Olympics and by performing the first HEVC demonstration. Harmonic became the outright industry leader in IPTV headends and went on to introduce its
IPTV 2.0 solution for unified all-HTTP adaptive bit rate (ABR) delivery architecture. It was at this time that Harmonic was the first to introduce a fully virtualized video production and delivery architecture with its groundbreaking virtualized IP-based media processing platform, VOS™. VOS facilitates origination of channels for delivery via broadcast and direct over the Internet to consumers with all the reliability and functionality of today’s broadcast infrastructure —but fully virtualized and deployable in a private or public cloud. Today, the Electra XVM virtualized media processor and Electra X advanced media processor sit at the heart of Harmonic's IP-based headend architecture. The Electra XVM is part of Harmonic's VOS family, consisting of both pure software and appliance-based products, Electra X2 for SD, HD and multiscreen media processing applications and X3 for UHD processing. Addressing growing demand for software-based, virtualized system deployments on IP-based server infrastructure — including support for the SMPTE 2022-6 standard for baseband over IP – Electra X and other Harmonic solutions enable customers to go end-to-end in IP, from camera to consumer display. The Harmonic Video Network (HVN) (www.hvn.tv), an OTT video streaming service launched in 2015, uses
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Harmonic solutions to demonstrate the efficiency gains, dramatic reduction in TCO and superior video quality that can be realized with unified playout, encoding and delivery in a fully virtualized environment. Electra X3, the industry's first converged media processor for UHD content, powers NASA TV UHD, the first consumer UHD channel in North America. Leveraging an end-to-end UHD delivery system built on Harmonic solutions, NASA's ambient video channel provides gorgeous 2160p60 video content from the space program. Winner of a 2015 IABM Design & Innovation Award, the Harmonic Spectrum X media server also supports emerging UHD applications and services. In addition to enabling direct ingest and output of IP feeds, supporting lightly compressed and uncompressed workflows, this solution gives users the freedom to move from HD channel-in-a-box (CIAB) playout with graphics and branding to UHD playout.
GOLD MEMBER
Since its founding in 1988, Harmonic has grown to become the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, and the first to provide broadcasters, service providers and other media companies with emerging video capabilities that are ready to deploy on a global scale.
media server systems set the industry standard by providing a unique combination of efficient compression and outstanding video quality, as well as rock-solid reliability, and the MediaGrid system – winner of the IABM’s prestigious Peter Wayne Award – firmly established Harmonic in the realm of efficient, scalable high-performance shared storage via Ethernet. In 2012 the company’s Spectrum ChannelPort integrated channel playout system combined channel branding and master control switching with clip playout to simplify the task of bringing new services to air quickly and affordably.
Through ongoing innovation, from production to distribution, Harmonic gives its customers the agility to navigate a rapidly evolving video economy. The company’s products help production, media, broadcast, cable, satellite, telecom, terrestrial and new media service companies respond to the challenges of the digital video revolution while reaping its benefits.
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