harmonic1408_harmonic 29/08/2015 09:08 Page 1
Harmonic is partnering
with Germany’s WISI to
take the power of fibre as
close as possible to
multiple dwellings.
Advanced Television
talked to Peter
Alexander, Harmonic’s
SVP and chief marketing
officer.
t ANGACOM, we
announced a relationship
with WISI for our NSG
Exo, our distributed Distributed Access
Device (DAA), where we’re OEMing the
equipment. So, they are taking our core
hardware and software technology and
packaging that for their customers.”
“A typical application for that is where you
have fibre to a building and many tenants in
the building – that can be in hospitality, it can
be multi-dwelling units. The device converts
from fibre to coax for the building –
essentially a small CMTS, then distributes the
services for the building.”
“So, it enables delivering fibre deep into the
network. Cable architecture is traditionally
very headend centric – we
have very large headends
then hybrid fibre coax out
to the subscriber, or the
pole, or the building, and
then it’s converted to coax
at that point. DAA allows
services onto the digital
fibre out to the building and then have the
CCAP or CMTS. It’s like a micro-headend;
you’re encompassing the functionality of a
centralised CCAP but delivering it in a form
factor for one or two service groups and so
ideal for buildings that have fibre access.”
“A
Partnering for cable
access
“Of course, Harmonics’s capabilities
encompass the end-to-end video delivery.
This starts with contribution, so we make
contribution encoders that might be used on
remote sites like news trucks or sports venues
for getting a digital video signal back to a
“Lower capex and opex, more service flexibility.”
studio or production facility. Then we do
ingest and storage for editing, we have an
integrated playout with graphics and branding
within a single system,
this is the Spectrum, the
broadcast industry’s
leading market share
playout server.”
“Polaris is our media
orchestration and
automation system and
then we have encoding and transcoding that
ultimately deliver the IP based video out into
the distribution network where we have our
NSG Pro, our centralised CCAP platform and
then, of course, we have NSG Exo, which we
have talked about.”
“VOS runs on an ordinary blade server.”
“NSG Exo moves a service provider’s RF
requirements out of the headend or hub and
places them deep in the fibre network,
simplifying headend design and operation to
resolve space and power constraints, lower
capital and operational expenses, and provide
service flexibility.”
for virtualisation of the entire delivery chain.
This allows you to choose what formats and
what bitrates and encoding schemes you need
in your video delivery infrastructure.”
“VOS can run on an ordinary blade server,
perhaps in a data centre, and can deliver
“As we go to 4K and UHD, much of the
operator’s delivery chain needs to be
upgraded, and so as we get into a mixture of
formats – some in UHD, some HD, some SD,
we’re taking a more software-centric
approach. Eighteen months ago, we
introduced VOS, a common software platform
UHD, HD, SD, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.265, or
HEVC at constant bitrate, variable bitrate or
adaptive bitrate coding all through one
software engine. So, for customers who adopt
the platform upgrading to UHD can be as easy
as a software upgrade, and making it easy to
deploy UHD is a big part of what we want to
demonstrate.”
“Whenever you need to add a new format all
you need is a software license and you can run
it on devices of your choice as long as they are
high-power Intel based servers. In terms of
the transition to software based video and its
rate of adoption, a lot of customers ask
‘What’s my road map to get to that, I can’t just
chuck all the old stuff out and start fresh?’
Also they often recognise that software and
virtualisation is definitely the destination but
their infrastructure or their technical teams
are just not ready. So we’ve responded by
packaging the software platform on individual
servers so they can have it as a separate
appliance within their system but it is also
ready to be migrated into a data centre
environment when they’re ready without
making a whole new purchase; it’s all
modular, it’s all portable.”
EUROMEDIA 37