Harmonic Solutions Target Production, Delivery of Sports Content

The Sports Video Group is pleased to welcome Harmonic as a premier sponsor. Based in San Jose, CA, Harmonic is a worldwide leader in video-delivery infrastructure for emerging television and video services. The company’s production-ready innovation enables content and service providers to efficiently create, prepare, and deliver differentiated services for television and new-media video platforms.

Harmonic’s solutions span production and distribution, enabling customers to be agile in today’s rapidly evolving video economy. The company helps production, media, broadcast, cable, satellite, telecom, terrestrial, and new-media–service companies respond to the challenges of the video revolution while reaping its benefits — including the ability to deliver video to any screen anywhere.

Key solutions in Harmonic’s product portfolio for sports production and playout include the Spectrum ChannelPort branded-channel-playout system, which speeds the cost-effective deployment of new SD and HD television channels by integrating branding and master-control switching with clip playback on the industry’s most trusted media-server platform; the Harmonic MediaGrid shared-storage solution, which suits applications requiring shared, real-time storage, such as edit-in-place, collaborative editing, transcoding, video on demand, and OTT adaptive-bitrate streaming; and the new Polaris suite of playout-management tools, which integrate with the Spectrum media-server family and represent the company’s first offering in the emerging media-orchestration category, which is important as workflows consolidate and simplify and video delivery becomes virtualized.

“The sports-production and -broadcasting community is the force behind most of the significant video innovation we’ve seen over the past decade. Advances in camera technology, compression schemes, and OTT video delivery, as well as the mass appeal of multiscreen services, have been directly influenced by the sports industry,” says Harmonic CMO Peter Alexander. “We’re pleased to align with the Sports Video Group and look forward to working with, and learning from, their growing and active community of sports-video professionals.”

NBC Olympics deployed Harmonic storage and server systems to support remote fast-turn content creation for its extensive multiplatform coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. The Harmonic MediaGrid system provided centralized shared storage, while the Spectrum MediaDeck server systems provided on-the-fly capture and proxy-generation for all incoming materials. The complete Harmonic platform granted both local and remote staff access to full-resolution files and proxies, enabling review and editing into highlights clips and sequences.

In preparation for the launch of Fox Sports 1 network, Fox installed an integrated channel-playout solution built on the Harmonic Spectrum ChannelPort. The system has enabled Fox to make the shift to efficient file-based playout with integrated master-control capabilities, supported by Spectrum MediaDeck 7000 playout servers, redundant MediaGrid systems, MediaCenter server controllers, and a redundant Media Application Server that provides media-asset management through integration with Fox’s existing automation system.