After launching at this year’s NAB in Las Vegas, the Selenio Media Convergence Platform from Harris was introduced to the South African market at the recent Mediatech Africa exhibition in Johannesburg.
Selenio supports content from multiple sources for delivery over multiple platforms by combining traditional baseband video and audio processing, video and audio compression and IP networking technology.
Harris Broadcast Communications’ commitment to South Africa was evidenced by the high level team, led by Richard Scott, senior vice president Global Sales and Services, on the stand of regional distributor Concilium Technologies.
“There has been a lot of interest in Selenio at the show and we are in discussions with several local broadcasters regarding a number of projects and tenders,’ noted Scott.
“Selenio is very significant in the industry globally as we are no longer in a single channel environment. Broadcasters have to repurpose content and deliver it over multiple platforms and there is a big move to IT-based files. So the difficulty up to now has been to convert all these formats into a single standard.
“Selenio allows you to plug in modules so that all formats can be converted within a single box, whereas previously you needed several boxes. This cuts down significantly on time, power and complexity. Selenio also allows the broadcaster to fix any issues pertaining to loudness.’
Its compact size makes it suitable for outside broadcast applications. According to Scott there has been a huge take-up of Selenio globally, including a big contract with Oman Telco.
Scott pointed out, with reference to South Africa’s launch next year of digital terrestrial television on the DVB-T2 platform, that Harris had designed the encoding and multiplexing technology for DVB-T2 together with the BBC.
“We make a whole range of transmitters and in fact rebuilt a big portion of Rwanda’s DVB-T and FM Radio network together with the DVB Group last year. This was a government led project and a huge success.
“There is lots of other Harris equipment in Africa, some of which has been running for 30 years, which proves that our products are very reliable,’ commented Scott.
