LAS VEGAS—Harmonic is expanding in the cloud and compressing some iconic blue beings into virtual reality with a singular concept in mind.
Ian Trow, Harmonic’s senior director of emerging technology and strategy, introduces the company’s blue man Group VR vignette. “Harmonic’s been focused on improving video ‘quality of experience,’” said Bart Spriester, senior vice president of video products and solutions.
Harmonic is incorporating this QoE concept into three key areas: OTT, ATSC 3.0 and playout.
On the playout front, Harmonic extended its VOS Cloud and VOS 360 platforms with its Spectrum playout technology, complete with Harmonic graphics, branding, DVEs, codecs and embedded automation.
For OTT, Harmonic’s QoE approach is about reducing latency while preserving video quality with its EyeQ compression optimization technology. EyeQ is said to be able to reduce the bitrate requirement of live streaming by up to 50 percent, thereby reducing latency to match that of live broadcasting.
With regard to ATSC 3.0, Harmonic will first focus on channel-sharing with Electra X encoding and ProStream X processing to enable migration from ATSC 1.0 to 3.0 with a software license activation.
On a blue note, Harmonic visited the Luxor to capture the Blue Man Group in 360-degree immersive video. The performance, produced in 8K and compressed with Harmonic’s PURE codec, is being featured in the vendor’s booth to highlight its VR efforts, including reducing the bit-rate necessary to stream VR.
Copyright NAB 2017
