SAN JOSE, CALIF.—The India-based direct-to-home arm of global telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel, Airtel Digital TV, has announced it is utilizing a compression headend system from Harmonic to improve its HD viewing experience. The deployment of Harmonic technology allows Airtel to expand its DTH HD portfolio to more than 50 premium channels.
Electra X2
The headend system is led by Harmonic’s Electra X2 advanced media processor, allowing high-quality, low-bandwidth MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoding of SD and HD video content for live DTH services. With the Harmonic PURE compression engine, the Electra X2 supports a range of video formats and codecs for satellite delivery, including HEVC.
The Electra X2 processors will be integrated with Harmonic’s ProStream 9100 stream processor and ProView 7100 integrated receiver-decoder, and controlled by Harmonic’s NMX video network management system.
