Peter Alexander, Harmonic’s chief marketing officer SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Harmonic is heading to the NAB Show a little lighter than before, after selling its cable access hybrid fiber coaxial business to Aurora Networks for $46 million earlier this year. The all-cash deal sees Harmonic divest itself of its legacy business in favor of the company’s product lines in cable edge, video production/playout, and video processing. The company’s cable access division makes optical transmitters, amplifiers, receivers and nodes for the cable TV industry.
Cable access was the company’s lowest margin product line, and “didn’t have much synergy” with its more successful product lines, said Peter Alexander, Harmonic’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Although Harmonic’s roots are in HFC, “the company has moved upstream into video end-to-end,” he said. Getting out of HFC “allows us to focus on our core businesses today.”
The sale will allow Harmonic to present its core business front and center at its booth, specifically highlighting products that deliver more efficient multiformat content production, reduce the cost of content distribution over any network, and enhance the delivery of high-quality video to any device. The company will also stage demos of Ultra HD and HEVC compression, plus Harmonic’s latest Ellipse contribution encoder.
NEW CLOUD SERVICE
Among new products at the show is Harmonic’s ProMedia Carbon MP transcoding solution, a cloud-based video transcoding service available on the Amazon (AWS) Marketplace. The service allows content creators, service providers and media professionals to convert video content to a wide range of production, processing and delivery formats. Being cloud-based, ProMedia Carbon MP makes it quick and painless for content providers to acquire new video libraries and convert them into popular formats without the cost and headaches of doing the transformations in-house.
Harmonic will feature enhancements to its Spectrum ChannelPort integrated channel play-out system, now offering new channel-in-a-box capabilities such as dual DVEs with independent branding.
The company will also highlight collaborative editing using Harmonic MediaGrid scalable shared storage optimized for video workflows. This approach combines the performance of a storage area network with the simplicity of network-attached storage, making it well-suited to production applications.
Harmonic will be in Booth SU1411 in the South Hall.
