Virgin Media is trying out Harmonic’s ProMedia Suite as a delivery mechanism for MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP).
Virgin Media is using Harmonic’s ProMedia Live real-time transcoder and ProMedia Package stream packager in its innovations research headend facility in London, the vendor said, and is demonstrating the MPEG-DASH workflow at the ANGA show this week in Germany.
Harmonic’s ProMedia Live transcodes MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC H.264 content to multiple adaptive bit-rate streams optimized for the Virgin Media MPEG-DASH service.
ProMedia Live also handles metadata information such as language, captions, and ad signaling upon input and output, Harmonic noted. ProMedia Live is integrated with Harmonic’s ProMedia Package, streamlining encapsulation and encryption processes.
Dale Barnes, director of advanced technologies and innovation at Virgin Media said, “As part of an integrated headend solution, Harmonic’s ProMedia Suite optimizes multiscreen delivery by eliminating the need to separately encode, encrypt, store, and transport each piece of video content to ensure compatibility with multiple HTTP delivery formats.
“The demo at ANGA COM will highlight the operational efficiencies achieved by implementing an MPEG-DASH-based workflow for next-generation multiscreen services converging on one ABR format, and unifying multiscreen delivery for tablets, PC’s, smartphones in addition to set-top boxes and Smart TV’s,” Barnes continued.
