Harmonic — Making MPEG-4 = Great Broadcasting (SatBroadcasting™)

Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT) has announced that OSN (Orbit Showtime Network), a leading DTH satellite provider serving the Middle East, has deployed Harmonic’s digital headend solutions to power its recently launched HD video service, the first MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) HD service being delivered to multiple countries in the region. OSN selected Harmonic’s Electra® 8000 multi-channel universal encoder, the market-leading compression platform, to deliver the new HD service, as well as for an upgrade of its existing standard definition (SD) channel lineup from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4.

As part of the network upgrade, OSN also implemented Harmonic’s ProStream™ 1000 stream processing platform for bulk scrambling and descrambling, and NMX Digital Service Manager™ to monitor and control the entire video service. Installation of the new systems was performed by GloCom, a Harmonic partner based in Dubai that handles Harmonic sales and local technical support in the Middle East. GloCom has been providing technical support for OSN’s existing Harmonic headends for more than five years.

The latest generation compression solution from Harmonic, the Electra 8000, supports SD and HD, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), as well as integrated statistical multiplexing, broadcast quality up/down-conversion and other unique features such as Jünger Level Magic™ automatic audio leveling adjustment. Electra 8000’s groundbreaking architecture, featuring up to four channels in a single rack unit, significantly reduces operational costs with its high density and power efficiency, and facilitates the launch of new value-added video services. The ProStream 1000 is the industry’s most flexible solution for a variety of stream processing needs, including scrambling/descrambling, re-encoding, bulk transcoding, statistical multiplexing, forward error correction (FEC), variable to constant bit-rate conversion, automatic audio level adjustment, and single frequency network (SFN) transmission over IP.