Norway’s GET Deploys Harmonic Infrastructure for HD Delivery

Harmonic announced that Norwegian operator GET has deployed a comprehensive Harmonic headend solution to power its IPTV, cable, and OTT multiscreen services. Through a high-density and scalable architecture designed to optimize bandwidth efficiencies, Harmonic’s video infrastructure solutions enable GET to cost-effectively deliver high-quality HD video services to a wide range of IP-connected devices.

“Continued strong subscriber demand for new cable and value-added video services made it imperative that we adopt a video infrastructure solution enabling continued scaling with great video quality,” said Christophe Brod, VP of Broadcast, GET. “Harmonic’s integrated headend solution enables us to deliver exceptional HD video quality and user experience for both linear broadcast and OTT multiscreen, while significantly decreasing our operational and capital expenses as we roll out cutting-edge video services.”

At the heart of GET’s integrated Harmonic headend is the fully redundant ProStream 1000 with ACE real-time transcoding platform. Utilizing this versatile processing solution, GET can perform MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video and audio transcoding of multiple HD broadcast channels, as well as advanced statistical multiplexing, in order to maximize bandwidth efficiencies across its IP network. ProStream reduces GET’s carbon footprint and operating expenses, leveraging a high-density, scalable architecture.

For live OTT services, Harmonic’s ProMedia Live real-time multiscreen video processing and encoding system leverages adaptive bit rate technology to transcode MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC content into multiple streams of H.264 with varying video resolutions and bit rates optimized for multiscreen delivery. Encoding is split across multiple machines to enable rapid media processing. ProStream and ProMedia Live are managed by Harmonic’s NMX Digital Service Manager, simplifying the creation, modification, and management of service lineups.

Harmonic ProMedia Carbon transcoders handle a variety of critical operations for GET’s VOD services, including SD/HD conversion, PAL/NTSC conversion, logo insertion, color space conversion, color correction, and closed-captions extraction, from a file-based architecture that can scale to meet the operator’s evolving business needs. The ProMedia Carbon transcoding farms are controlled via a Harmonic WFS file-based workflow system, which provides automated processing of high-volume transcoding tasks, failover support, job distribution management, job prioritization, load balancing, FTP transfer, status monitoring, and job notification, to further increase operational efficiencies.

“Given the increased consumer demand over the last several years for a high-quality video experience on any device, multiscreen video services are becoming an important tool for cable operators to retain existing customers as well as attract new subscribers,” said Thomas Henriksen, regional sales director, North Europe, Harmonic. “By maximizing GET’s scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiencies through a unified platform, Harmonic’s video infrastructure solutions will help streamline multiscreen and OTT delivery while enabling the operator to achieve a superior video quality.”