Harmonic unveils VOS Technology at the NAB Show
April 7, 2014
Harmonic, a specialist in video delivery infrastructure, has announced Harmonic VOS, a powerful, extensible software platform and architecture designed to shape the future of video production and delivery. VOS will enable completely virtualised media processing from a single software platform, encompassing historically discreet functions from ingest to playout, graphics, branding, compression, packaging, and delivery for broadcast and multiscreen applications. Harmonic will offer the first public demonstrations of VOS at booth SU1210 during the 2014 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 7-10.
VOS has the potential to fundamentally change the video delivery ecosystem by bringing all media processing functions into one simplified, unified platform and workflow for increased operational flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. Operating virtually in IT data center environments, VOS can scale up or down to accommodate peaks in demand based on capacity and functional requirements across all video services.
“Harmonic VOS represents the future of video production and delivery, enabling the transformation to a software-defined, integrated, and operationally elastic infrastructure,” said Patrick Harshman, president and CEO of Harmonic. “Video content providers and service providers want greater flexibility, speed, and the ability to leverage the cost-effective scale of IT environments. With VOS, our customers will be able to create and distribute new video content globally in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the resources that it takes today, with better video quality, while leveraging public and private clouds.”
VOS includes Harmonic’s PURE Compression Engine, providing ground-breaking video quality and bandwidth efficiency for SD, HD, and Ultra HD formats; MPEG-2, MPEG-4/AVC, and HEVC compression over CBR; VBR, and ABR streams.
Harmonic also announced Electra XVM, the first product to be delivered based on VOS. Electra XVM is an integrated package of VOS functionality, including the PURE Compression Engine, playout, advanced graphics, packaging, and delivery, and operates in data center environments on OpenStack or VMware vSphere environments for maximum operational flexibility. Virtual machine instances of Electra XVM can leverage data center capacity on demand according to the mix of codecs and formats used, from MPEG-2 SD to HEVC Ultra HD.
“Electra XVM represents a new kind of product — and a new kind of capability — for our industry,” said Krish Padmanabhan, senior vice president of video products for Harmonic. “It is completely virtual and completely IP, and offers unprecedented functional breadth and video quality. With workflow efficiency, bandwidth savings, and flexible cost models, it changes the economics and flexibility paradigms of content playout, distribution, and multiplatform service delivery.”
“Media processing is inevitably moving into the software realm, increasing our operational flexibility while lowering operating costs,” said Clyde Smith, senior vice president of new technology at FOX Network Center. “Harmonic is unique in virtualizing all aspects of media processing — not just encoding — into one architecture.”