Harmonic has boosted the capacity of its ProStream 1000 transcoder to deliver up to 80 adaptive streaming profiles in a single one-rack-unit appliance, and announced a deal to provide NBC Olympics storage and transcoding systems for the broadcaster's production of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
The vendor's enhancements to the ProStream 1000 are based on the next generation of its Agile Compression Engine (ACE) for H.264 video. The transcoder supports a combination of broadcast and multiscreen formats, including Apple HTTP Live Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH and Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming.
In addition to ProStream, the company's multiscreen-video portfolio includes ProMedia file transcoders, adaptive bit rate packager and origin server, and its MediaGrid active storage system. ProStream 1000 currently supports more than 18,000 broadcast TV channels worldwide.
Separately, Harmonic said it will provide Omneon MediaGrid shared storage systems and ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding software to NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, for its broadcast of the Summer Games from London July 27 - Aug. 12.
The NBC Olympics Highlights Factory will use the Harmonic gear for NBCOlympics.com, mobile platform distribution, and IPTV and VOD services. This is the third consecutive Olympic Games that NBC is using Harmonic's solutions in the broadcast workflow.
"When we're able to give our production team unrestricted access to all media, with search tools that help them to find the best shots, we enable them to create segments with high-emotional impact," NBC Olympics vice president of information technology Craig Lau said in a statement.
During the 2012 London Olympic Games, incoming HD content from different venues will be recorded by Sony XDCAM XDS-PD1000 systems and transferred along with a low-res proxy to a 288-Terabyte MediaGrid at the International Broadcast Center in London. Simultaneously, those full-resolution recordings will be replicated and transferred by Harmonic's ProCast IP acceleration solution over a 10-Gigabit-per-second circuit to a 432-TB MediaGrid system at NBCUniversal's 30 Rock facility in New York City. In both London and New York, ProMedia Carbon will perform transcoding of content on the MediaGrid systems.
In addition to the MediaGrid and ProMedia Carbon systems at the IBC and at 30 Rock, NBC Olympics will use 72-TB MediaGrid systems along with ProMedia Carbon transcoders at the three largest venues -- track and field, gymnastics and swimming -- for storage and processing of content offloaded over a 1-Gbps connection from EVS XT server systems.
