Harmonic continues to insinuate itself into the on-demand market. Leveraging its encoders and transcoders, Harmonic is positioning the ability to quickly translate video from any video format to any other as a foundational capability for providing, on-demand, any piece of content on any delivery platform.

To that end, Harmonic introduced MediaPrism, a suite of content preparation tools aimed at taking video from any source – including tapes, DVD, live broadcast, Web or user-generated content – and preparing for presentation on-demand.

MediaPrism integrates Harmonic’s Clearcut offline storage encoding, Livecut scheduler, Rhozet Carbon Coder universal transcoding solution, and Ingest Gateway.

The key element is the transcoder, which Harmonic picked up with its recent acquisition of Rhozet. The transcoder allows Harmonic to take just about any video and quickly turn it into a VOD asset.

Shahar Bar, the company’s director of on-demand solutions, said, “The combination of MediaPrism with Harmonic’s Armada intelligent content management application and StreamLiner video servers provides a more comprehensive solution for high-quality VOD services.”

A new example of the type of application Harmonic is trying to enable is provided by Israeli satellite provider Yes. Harmonic just announced that Yes will use the Carbon Coder to enable a new Internet-based, broadband video-on-demand (VOD) service. Yes will take video prepared for satellite and recode it in Windows Media format for delivery over the Web.

Separately, Harmonic said that Portugal Telecom has deployed its DiviCom Electra MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoders to power its IPTV service, called Meo. The digital video headend includes the Electra 7000 high definition (HD) encoders and Electra 5400 standard definition (SD) encoders. Portugal Telecom’s IPTV service runs on the Microsoft Mediaroom multimedia and IPTV software platform. The overall system was designed and integrated by Alcatel-Lucent.