Harmonic Inc. has announced that Germany’s HSE24 has transitioned its multiple home shopping networks onto a Harmonic production storage and playout platform.
A Harmonic Spectrum media server system provides continuous playout for the four broadcast channels within the award-winning HSE24 network, and a Harmonic MediaGrid active storage system serves as post-production storage for recorded on-air content and supports an edit-in-place workflow in post-production.
“We chose to work with the Harmonic storage and server solutions because we needed a stable playout environment and more robust central storage for our post-production activities,” said Dieter Baron, vice president, broadcast technical at HSE24. “The Harmonic systems offer ease of use, scalable capacity, and I/O channels, and the high redundancy and availability critical for 24-hour broadcast operations such as ours. “We’ve also used the Harmonic platform to create a highly efficient edit workflow that reduces the time and cost required to turn around programming quickly. The local support has been excellent, as has been the performance of our Harmonic systems.”
Over its 16-year history, HSE24 has served 7.5 million shoppers. Today the network’s channels are available to 40 million households — 36 million in Germany, three million in Austria, and one million in Switzerland.
The company’s Spectrum server system handles playout for the network’s main channel, HSE24, as well as its digital special interest channels, HSE24 TREND and HSE24 EXTRA, and for a newly launched channel, HSE24 Italy. The Harmonic server system operates in conjunction with AVECO automation, which allows users to control the server from anywhere on the network.
HSE24 uses the MediaGrid system for central storage, including 19 hours of content from two channels daily, and to support editing with Final Cut Pro® systems. Editors can load a file for editing in Final Cut Pro and, after post-production is complete, very quickly save the new file for playout.
