Harmonic powers Virgin’s MPEG-DASH trial
June 4, 2013
Harmonic, a specialist in video delivery infrastructure, has revealed that Virgin Media has deployed Harmonic’s ProMedia Suite for a trial of the new Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) protocol. Utilising Harmonic’s ProMedia Live real-time transcoder and ProMedia Package stream packager in its innovations research headend facility in London, Virgin Media can deliver more efficient and cost-effective high-quality broadcasts to TVs, PCs, tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, and other IP-connected devices.
Dale Barnes, director of advanced technologies and innovation at Virgin Media said, “As part of an integrated headend solution, Harmonic’s ProMedia Suite optimises multiscreen delivery by eliminating the need to separately encode, encrypt, store, and transport each piece of video content to ensure compatibility with multiple HTTP delivery formats. The demo (at ANGA COM) will highlight the operational efficiencies achieved by implementing an MPEG-DASH-based workflow for next-generation multiscreen services converging on one ABR format, and unifying multiscreen delivery for tablets, PCs, and smartphones, in addition to set-top boxes and Smart TVs.”
Harmonic’s ProMedia Live transcodes MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC H.264 content to multiple high-quality adaptive bit-rate streams optimised for the Virgin Media MPEG-DASH service. In addition, ProMedia Live efficiently handles metadata information such as language, captions, and ad signaling upon input and output. ProMedia Live is integrated with Harmonic’s ProMedia Package, streamlining encapsulation and encryption processes. Completely software-based, the flexible, high-performance solution can scale to support hundreds of simultaneous streams, simplifying the deployment of the multiscreen services.