Jordan Media City Boosts Direct-to-Home Satellite Service With Harmonic

Harmonic announced that Jordan Media City (JMC), a privately owned media company based in Amman, Jordan, has chosen an end-to-end headend solution from Harmonic to support its direct-to-home (DTH) satellite service. JMC is using Harmonic’s ProView integrated receiver decoders (IRDs), Electra X2 advanced media processors, ProStream 9100 with ACE stream processors and transcoders, and NMX Digital Service Manager to manage its entire DTH workflow, from channel acquisition to reception, descrambling, encoding, transcoding, multiplexing, and scrambling.

By providing JMC with a high-density, scalable video infrastructure solution that features the latest technologies for DVB-S2, MPEG-4 AVC and statistical multiplexing, Harmonic has dramatically increased the media company’s bandwidth efficiency, improved video quality, and decreased its operating expenses.

“Video quality is a key differentiator for media companies. Yet, the prospect of delivering better video quality, using less bandwidth, is only achievable through the support of a trusted video infrastructure provider,” says Hani Al-Khararbeh, teleport manager, Jordan Media City. “Harmonic offers a complete headend solution for DTH service delivery, accommodating all of our specific requirements, including ease of operation at a low total cost of ownership. Through broad support of industry standards and formats, as well as advanced capabilities like variable bitrate encoding and statistical multiplexing, the new headend enables us to deliver excellent video quality at low bit rates.”

JMC is using Harmonic’s ProView 7100 and ProView 8100 IRDs for satellite reception. The ProView units integrate with Harmonic’s market-leading Electra X2 advanced media processors for high-quality, low-bandwidth MPEG-4 AVC variable bit rate encoding of SD video content for live DTH services. Powered by the Harmonic PURE Compression Engine, the media processors support a wide range of video formats and codecs for satellite delivery, including HD and HEVC, simplifying operations and future upgrades for the media company.

Tight integration between the Electra X2 processors and Harmonic’s ProStream 9100 stream processors with DiviTrackIP statmux technology maximizes the efficiency and flexibility of JMC’s statistical multiplexing operations. Through the unified headend solution, JMC can support up to 100 services per statistically multiplexed pool, 14 pools per platform, and three pools within a single transport stream in order to increase bandwidth efficiency. Using a combination of Electra and ProStream for statistical multiplexing has led to significant cost savings and enhanced video quality for JMC.

The ProView, Electra, and ProStream solutions are controlled by Harmonic’s NMX video network management solution, which provides mass configuration, monitoring and automated redundancy in centralized or distributed architectures.

“JMC is one of the largest media hubs in the Middle East, with the ability to playout and uplink television channels from all over the world. As new SD and HD channels are added to the JMC lineup in the future, bandwidth efficiency will be essential,” says Ian Graham, vice president of sales for EMEA at Harmonic. “Using an end-to-end headend solution from Harmonic, JMC can deliver more channels than ever before, with better video quality. By providing JMC with an affordable solution for DTH service delivery, and flexibility to migrate to future codecs like HEVC, Harmonic will enable the media company to stay competitive in this growing market.”