Harmonic is leveraging its encoding expertise to extend into new areas for the company: video quality monitoring and optimization in one instance, and digital content protection in another.
The company’s Iris video quality (VQ) software resides on a separate server and draws from the company’s encoders information on both the source video and the encoded video for analysis in real time. The system provides a variety of quality of service (QoS) measurements that can be the basis for real-time monitoring, as well as for generating historical reports.
Harmonic said operators can check the status of video quality, global channel availability, statmux pool optimization scores, and source quality and complexity.
Operators can set threshold values, and if video quality drifts outside of those parameters, it can signal an alarm, explained Harmonic product marketing manager Marios Stylianou. Otherwise, data is entered in a database, which can be used to provide historical performance reports.
“Headend managers can receive a pre-scheduled report, giving them a full view of their system’s QoS, helping to ensure high availability. With Iris, service providers gain a range of benefits, including lower churn and increased revenue per user,” Stylianou said.
Iris is available in Foundation, Standard and Enterprise editions. The Foundation edition supports 100 programs, while the Standard edition supports 250 programs and offers advanced functionality. The Enterprise edition supports up to 500 programs and offers the most comprehensive set of tools and reports available.
Iris can be used in conjunction with Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra encoders, ProStream 1000 stream processing platform and NMX Digital Service Manager to provide a cost-effective and centrally managed solution for QoS monitoring.
Meanwhile, Harmonic said its Rhozet Carbon Coder transcoding solution can now be used as a delivery platform for generating ID files for YouTube’s Content ID System. The development allows Carbon Coder users to protect their content by automatically generating an ID file – a digital “fingerprint” – of the video content they own during the transcoding process.
Using YouTube’s Content ID System, they may then upload these ID files to YouTube and use them to automatically identify their content in user-uploaded videos on YouTube, and then apply “usage policies” that have been specified by the content owners regarding how they want matched content to be handled by YouTube, such as monetize, track usage statistics or block content, Harmonic explained.
With this process, content does not have to be delivered to YouTube in order to be protected – only the fingerprint is delivered. The producers of a television series can, for example, fingerprint content while in production. Once an episode has been aired, the owners could then choose to allow it to be shown on YouTube and share in the advertising revenue generated by that episode, or to block it from YouTube, Harmonic explained.
The move complements activity by Harmonic that also touches on digital content protection (story here).
