NBC Olympics Utilizes Harmonic for Winter Games

NEW YORK -- Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT), the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, has been selected to provide its Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage and Spectrum MediaDeck integrated media playout server systems to NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, during its production of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, from Feb. 6-23. The announcement was made today by David Mazza, senior vice president, NBC Olympics, and Peter Alexander, chief marketing officer at Harmonic.

NBC Olympics will use the Harmonic solution to support a "highlights factory" in which staff based at the broadcaster's Stamford, Conn., facility will very quickly access event footage captured in Russia, create highlights clips, and make them available to mobile devices and computers. This wide-area production model facilitates cost-effective content creation by allowing NBC Olympics to maintain a significant portion of its operation in the United States.

During the two-week London event, NBC Olympics served up more than two billion page views, setting new records, and the "NBC Olympics Live Extra" app became one of the most downloaded in Apple app store history. During the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Harmonic infrastructure and other production solutions already well-established at the Stamford facility, will operate along with systems installed at the broadcaster's Sochi headquarters to enable NBC Olympics to bring high volumes of timely content to nonlinear distribution platforms.

Harmonic MediaDeck video servers will record as many as 25 incoming venue feeds as both XDCAM-HD at 50 Mbps and H.264 low-resolution proxy. These systems also will give Stamford personnel independent control over 60 channels of local ingest. Each recording's proxy is replicated in near real-time on a 480 TB Harmonic MediaGrid storage system connected via two 10-Gigabit circuits to a second 384 TB MediaGrid installed at the Stamford facility. In less than a minute, content created on the Sochi MediaGrid system will be replicated on the Stamford MediaGrid system.

Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT)

(0)  |