Sinclair Taps Harmonic

Multicasting is once again front and center at Sinclair Broadcast Group. The company will deploy Harmonic MV 450 low-bit-rate encoders across its station group to help transmit HD signals to viewers.

KOVR Sacramento, Calif., KGAN Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and WCGV Milwaukee are among the stations that will use the unit along with Harmonic's MediaNode MN20 multiplexer. Sinclair has 62 stations in 39 markets.

"We're standardizing on the DiviCom MV 450 to take our service to the next level," says Del Parks, Sinclair Broadcast vice president of engineering and operations. "It will enable us to achieve our objective of delivering multichannel SD and HD programming with the best picture quality in the market."

Features of the MV 450 include LookAhead processing and Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF). Both help eliminate the tradeoff that occurs when bit rate is lowered and picture quality degrades.