Complete Coverage:NAB Show 2013
With over-the-top content delivery, HEVC and 4K becoming hot
topics for this year's NAB Show, Harmonic is unveiling significant enhancements
to its ProMedia suite of adaptive bit rate (ABR) solutions for multiscreen
processing and delivery that include support for HEVC and Ultra HD.
The product is also now more closely integrated with the
Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage system and is offering improved support for
closed captioning, regional blackouts, and Nielsen ID3 tagging.
"ProMedia is the industry's most complete multiscreen
preparation solution," said Krish Padmanabhan, senior VP of products at
Harmonic. "The latest enhancements to the product family arrive at the
perfect time, as more broadcasters and service providers are looking to expand
their portfolio with high-quality multiscreen services that scale and deliver
amazing video."
The company noted that HEVC compression offers up to 50%
better compression efficiency than H.264 and that it will be important for the
growing use of Ultra HD or 4K, which requires much more bandwidth than
traditional HD.
Harmonic will be demoing the ability to delivery higher
resolution video to multiple screens at the 2013 NAB Show on the ProMedia Live
real-time and ProMedia Xpress file-based transcoders.
"The open nature of the ProMedia suite
provides substantial investment protection while enabling customers to ride the
Intel performance curve," Padmanabhan also noted in a statement. "The
applications are not tied to a closed or GPU-centric hardware infrastructure,
so ProMedia customers can utilize their IT buying power to realize significant
cost-savings when launching pay-TV multiscreen services. Providers can even
virtualize their multiscreen transcoding and delivery infrastructure without
compromising performance or video quality."
