Live from NAB: Harmonic Nets Deal With NBC Olympics, Boosts Power in ProStream Transcoder

The 2012 Summer Olympics in London are being billed as the first Games of the second-screen and Harmonic is in prime position to capitalize on it.

Patrick Harschman, CEO and president of Harmonic, addresses the crowd during a pre-NAB press conference at Planet Hollywood on Saturday.

At its pre-NAB press conference on Saturday night, Harmonic announced a deal that will provide the company’s Omneon MediaGrid shared storage systems and ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding software to NBC Olympics, during its production of the 2012 London Games.

While this is the third straight Olympics that Harmonic has had a role in NBC’s workflow, its increased role on the second screen is the big win in the deal.

“We’re quite excited about it,” said CEO and president Patrick Harshman. “[NBC] is always doing innovative things especially with the second screen. We’re really pleased to be a part of this.”

The Harmonic media storage and transcoding systems will enable NBC Olympics to process and deliver its content, while relying on digital media in a file-based environment within the NBC Olympics Highlights Factory, which is used to support content creation for NBCOlympics.com, mobile platform distribution, and IPTV and VOD services.

There is also a useful integration of the MediaGrid storage systems with Avid edit and media management systems.

To ensure timely turnaround for on-demand content, NBC Olympics will use a ProMedia Carbon transcoding farm to generate the multiformat video delivered to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices via the NBCOlympics.com website. Supporting an array of acquisition, editing, broadcast, Web, and mobile video formats, ProMedia Carbon minimizes file movement and improves workflow efficiency by enabling all transcoding operations to be performed in place on the MediaGrid file system.

Harmonic also unveiled the next generation of ACE (Agile Compression Engine) which leverages H.264 video compression expertise to deliver higher transcoding density. With the new multiscreen transcoding functionality, the ProStream 1000 with ACE can transcode up to 20 HD streams and 80 adaptive streaming profiles in a single one-rack-unit appliance.

As a key component of Harmonic’s comprehensive multiscreen solution suite, the ProStream 1000 with ACE is integrated with Harmonic’s powerful ProMedia™ file transcoders, adaptive bit rate packager and origin server, and MediaGrid™ active storage system, enabling seamless and operationally-efficient deployment of multiscreen services.

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