Norway's Altibox Selects Harmonic's VOD and Digital Mosaic Solutions

Advanced On-Demand IPTV and Interactive EPG Navigation Powered by StreamLiner® Video Servers, Armada® Intelligent Asset Management and ProStream™ 8000 Digital Mosaic

AMSTERDAM — IBC 2009 Stand #1.C61 — Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ:HLIT) today announced that Altibox (formerly Lyse Tele), a telecommunications service provider based in Norway, has deployed Harmonic’s StreamLiner® video servers, Armada® intelligent asset management, and ProStream™ 8000 digital mosaic solution. This deployment enables advanced IPTV video-on-demand (VOD) services and multi-channel mosaic viewing for Altibox subscribers across Norway and Denmark. Altibox is initially introducing this advanced IPTV offering for Norwegian Elite Series football programming with plans to expand to additional sporting events in the future.

To deliver an unrivaled viewing experience to football fans across its network, Altibox relies on StreamLiner video servers and the Armada asset management system for live content ingest and recording, and instantaneous provisioning of up to ten simultaneous matches to over 200,000 set-top boxes in the Altibox network.

With this deployment, subscribers can watch a live football match and switch to on demand viewing of important events in other matches using Altibox’s intuitive Electronic Program Guide (EPG). This capability gives subscribers complete control of their viewing experience when multiple matches are played concurrently. In addition, the ProStream 8000 digital video mosaic solution generates the multi-channel mosaics that allow the subscriber to watch up to eight simultaneous football matches on a mosaic grid or in full-screen mode, and interactively link to the VOD content to follow highlights from all matches.

“Harmonic helps us offer our subscribers high quality, state-of-the-art IPTV services and a significantly enhanced viewing experience for sports and other premium content,” said Tore Kristoffersen, CTO at Altibox. “We can combine VOD and standard broadcast TV experiences to bring a new level of interactivity to our IPTV service, giving us a competitive advantage in the market.”

“Harmonic continues to deliver technologies that enable leading-edge operators like Altibox to successfully deploy innovative and advanced on-demand services,” said Ian Graham, Vice President of Europe and Middle East Sales at Harmonic Inc. “Our powerful and highly scalable software-based solutions provide operators with a unified system easily tailored to provide value-added services such as time-shifted TV, VOD and interactive video mosaics to enhance the TV viewing experience.”

As the popularity of services such as VOD, time-shifted TV, and network personal video recording (nPVR) continues to grow, the ability to effectively manage and control the on-demand infrastructure is becoming more critical. The StreamLiner and Armada solutions enable satellite, cable, and telco operators to more easily and intelligently scale on-demand content delivery by dynamically allocating assets at the network edge based on popularity. In addition to providing a powerful solution for traditional VOD and innovative applications like the new Altibox service, StreamLiner video servers can efficiently deliver content to the TV, PC and mobile devices as a component of Harmonic’s recently enhanced MediaPrism™ converged video delivery solutions.