Harmonic: Streaming Success
Posted on Apr 3, 2024 by Samara Husbands
Another year of ‘amazing growth’
Ahead of what promises to be another dynamic edition of NAB Show for Harmonic, Jean Macher tells FEED about the continuing success of the VOS360 and its other offerings
Sponsored editorial
With another year of notable streaming deployments to Harmonic’s credit, it comes as no surprise that Jean Macher – the company’s business development director of SaaS solutions – sounds a satisfied note about the company’s progress in an extremely competitive sector.
“Ever since we launched VOS360, our end-to-end cloud media processing platform, we have experienced amazing growth in streaming, especially for sports,” he says. “That trend has continued throughout the past 12 months with a number of major live events confirming that many Tier 1 players are opting to use our technology, as we are one of few that provide a streaming platform that is big-scale, high-quality, robust and innovative.”
Indeed, innovation is integral to its USP, as the SaaS nature of the VOS360 platform means new features are regularly being added.
“It’s not exactly the kind of approach whereby your customers make the most of a platform for a few years then move on to a new one,” Macher explains to us.
“This is a different kind of technology development in that any new improvements we bring to the software – such as enhancement to video quality – become available to customers right away, no matter how they are working. This is true whether that’s remotely in the cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two.”
While traditional linear broadcasting remains a key part of the Harmonic business, Macher confirms that the company has ‘invested heavily in streaming-focused features and capabilities for the past six or seven years’.
Accordingly, new capacities to make streaming even more seamless and efficient will feature prominently at the NAB Show, including:
New cloud appliance capabilities: These revolve around the Spectrum X cloud server with Harmonic’s MediaGrid scalable storage.
Multiple new features and tools have been added to facilitate today’s production workloads.
The recent migration to cloud-native software: For both VOS and XOS processing, it allows all the capabilities of the Harmonic production and playout appliances to be achieved in the public cloud as well as on-premises.
The result is that broadcasters can operate their production and playout workflows wherever they wish, with the commonality of approach also enabling customers to make channel playout or edge modifications with minimal disruption.
Automated scheduling for FAST channels: While the FAST model is generating huge interest across the world at the moment, there is a need for broadcasters to keep the costs associated with establishing and operating these channels to a minimum.
As part of its mission to help reduce the labour requirement involved in FAST services, Harmonic will be showcasing a new feature that supports the automated creation of programme schedules.
Macher reveals that it means the customer can ‘harvest their libraries of content, tag that content and then leverage AI to achieve automatic schedule creation’.
The closer broadcasters can come to ‘the concept of a self-driving channel’ in a cost-pressured sector, the better.
NAB Show 2024 will also find Harmonic showcasing its XOS Advanced Media Processor, which now offers a complete playout-to-delivery feature set that simplifies video streaming, distribution and broadcast workflows.
The expanded XOS solution lowers costs and helps reduce the amount of energy consumption as well as streamlining operations for headend and edge applications.
It combines broadcast-grade playout with extensive media processing features on a single software-based appliance.
In particular, says Macher, show visitors will have the chance to find out “how they can use the XOS as part of their transition away from satellite towards IP, in conjunction with our VOS360 software running in the cloud. We’ve done that with a number of customers and it’s a really nice, elegant way of controlling and planning that transition.”
With Harmonic also set to showcase its latest innovations developed to boost monetisation (with Microsoft) and increase sports fan engagement, there is every reason to visit to the company’s stand (W2831) at NAB Show.
This sponsored editorial was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of FEED.
