Harmonic to Showcase Enhancements to Spectrum™ Media Server System at IBC2012

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
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New Releases for Spectrum Media Server Family Support Simple, Fast, Cost-Effective Production-to-Playout Workflow

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT), the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, today announced enhancements to its Spectrum™ media server family. The recently introduced Spectrum ChannelPort™ integrated channel playout device boasts new capabilities and advanced onboard features that further simplify channel playout, and the new Spectrum MediaStore™ 5000 high-performance disk-based shared storage system brings the benefits of serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives to Spectrum media server systems.

“Harmonic’s goal is to provide broadcasters and other service providers with solutions that help them produce video content more efficiently and cost-effectively, and the capabilities of both ChannelPort and MediaStore 5000 reflect this priority,” said Krish Padmanabhan, senior vice president of video products at Harmonic. “Each of these Spectrum server family products addresses the challenges that our customers face in distributing a greater volume of content with fewer resources.”

Combining channel branding and master control switching with clip playout on the industry’s most trusted media server platform, the modular ChannelPort enables broadcasters, content owners, and service providers to speed the cost-effective deployment of new television channels through a simple incremental upgrade to their existing Spectrum architecture.

The new ChannelPort features include DVE functionality to enable more sophisticated, high-end graphics presentations, and support for AVC-Intra playout that aids in accelerating the production-to-playout workflow. The system’s new dynamic subtitle insertion capability supports just-in-time playout of multilingual content. Traffic-driven onboard playout control with automatic media fetch facilitates remote “lights-out” operation without the need for legacy automation software.

The MediaStore 5000, which makes its worldwide debut at IBC2012, brings the latest SAS disk technology — and associated savings in size, cost, and power requirements — to the storage component of the Spectrum media server system. MediaStore systems combine with MediaPort and MediaDirector systems to comprise a full Spectrum system. The release of the 2-RU MediaStore 5000 introduces a smaller form factor, higher bandwidth, and greater storage capacity.

The MediaStore 5000 boasts industry-leading density, accommodating up to 24 hot-swappable high-performance drives in a space-efficient chassis. The system supports hard-disk drive (HDD) sizes of 300 GB, 600 GB, and 900 GB for a maximum of 62.8 TB of usable online storage, and it provides storage bandwidth of up to 1600 MBps. Reliable performance is assured by a RAID 6 storage topology, hardware redundancy, and the same robust architecture already proven in MediaStore 4000 systems.

Spectrum ChannelPort and Spectrum MediaStore 5000 will be featured at Harmonic’s stand 1.B20 during IBC2012 in Amsterdam, Sept. 7-11. At IBC the company will demonstrate solutions that enable broadcasters and operators to produce video content more efficiently in any format, distribute content cost-effectively over any network, and support a high-quality viewing experience reliably on any device.