Harmonic Inc. has announced that now TV, a member of PCCW and Hong Kong’s leading pay-TV operator, has chosen Harmonic’s ProMedia software solutions to power its new OTT multiscreen streaming application, the now Player.
TheProMedia Live real-time multiscreen video processing and encoding system and the ProMedia Package adaptive stream preparation system, managed by Harmonic’s NMX Digital Service Manager, enable now TV subscribers to watch high-quality live television and video-on-demand services on any viewing platform, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and other IP-connected devices.
Says Belinda Chan, senior vice president of operations and technology at PCCW: “now TV wanted to augment its service to include a high-quality and reliable over-the-top viewing experience. Harmonic’s ProMedia family allows us to support live streaming efficiently, while providing a superior quality of service. By accessing an over-the-top media portal in our broadcast operation center, now TV subscribers can connect to a variety of rich media content on any device anytime.”
Leveraging Harmonic’s award-winning H.264 video codec technology, ProMedia Live transcodes baseband MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC H.264 content to multiple high-quality adaptive bitrate streams optimized for now TV’s OTT services. Encoding can be split across multiple machines, providing now TV with an efficient workflow that optimises the processing required for delivering streaming video. By effectively handling metadata information — language, captions, ad signaling/insertion – on input and output, ProMedia Live further simplifies operations. ProMedia Live is integrated with Harmonic’s ProMedia Package to perform sophisticated transcoding, encapsulation, and encryption processes, all from a unified platform. This powerful integrated functionality reduces now TV’s carbon footprint dramatically, leading to decreased capital and operating expenditures.
Harmonic’s NMX Digital Service Manager controls both the ProMedia Live and ProMedia Package systems, enabling now TV to seamlessly monitor and manage its multiscreen video and audio services. Through a comprehensive user interface, now TV can create and modify channel lineups in addition to setting encoding and rate-shaping parameters. NMX features a highly scalable and extensible architecture that grows in tandem with the environment it supports, a benefit that will allow now TV to easily introduce new value-added services like start over and catch-up TV as its business needs evolve.
