Harmonic Doubles Down at NAB Following Omneon Acquisition

Fresh off the acquisition of Omneon last summer, Harmonic will have a two-fold presence at the NAB Show, highlighting the expanded array of products available from the new entity. Harmonic’s booth in the South Upper Hall (SU4909) will focus on the company’s established distribution and delivery solutions, and its stand in South Lower Hall (SL2005) will focus on the production and playout solutions that Omneon brings to the table.

“We’ve made tremendous progress since announcing the deal nine months ago,” Harmonic President/CEO Patrick Harshman said at the company’s press conference on Saturday. “The most important thing is, we haven’t lost a step in terms of product development during this integration process. Our product-development engine is running extremely well.”

That product-development engine has resulted in the unveiling of three products and major enhancements to another at the NAB Show.

Omneon MediaPort 7000
First up among the new products at SL2005 is the Omneon MediaPort 7000 series of video I/O modules for the Omneon Spectrum media-server system. The MediaPort 7000 series enables the Spectrum video server to simultaneously support a range of codecs, formats, frame rates, and resolutions, along with fully integrated up/down/crossconversion and simulcast SD and HD outputs for every channel.

The 1RU unit is available in two- or four-channel configurations and uses a slot-based form factor that allows addition of channels to existing systems without disrupting on-air operations.

Omneon Spectrum MediaCenter
Also on display at SL2005 will be the Omneon Spectrum MediaCenter, a new multichannel media server aimed squarely at the local and regional broadcast market as well as remote playout facilities. Featuring low-cost storage and support for Spectrum MediaPort modularity and scalability, MediaCenter targets operations requiring four to 12 channels in a single video-server configuration.

Omneon MediaGrid
On the distribution and delivery side at SU4909, Harmonic will exhibit a new version of the Omneon MediaGrid active-storage system. According to SVP of Marketing Jeff Steadman, the system lowers the cost of storage capacity by 25%-30%, depending on the configuration. The new system combines new ContentServer 3000 scale-out storage hardware and a new version (v3.0) of the Omneon MediaGrid file-system software that features integrated software RAID for advanced data protection.

ProStream 4000
Enhanced capabilities for Harmonic’s ProStream 4000 multiscreen transcoder include increased scalability, enhanced H.264 video encoding, multi-encapsulation, and expanded compatibility with a range of CDNs and digital-rights–management (DRM) software.

ProStream 4000 now supports the simultaneous processing of up to 48 video inputs and 48 legacy mobile-phone, 18 iPhone, 12 SD, or four transcoded HD video outputs per 1RU. The ProStream 4000’s new built-in multi-encapsulation feature enables operators to encode once and encapsulate to a variety of video formats, including Apple HTTP Live Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming, as well as multi-bitrate transport streams for NDS and Widevine Adaptive Streaming.