AMSTERDAM -- Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ:HLIT - News) today announced that Telenor Satellite Broadcasting, a fully owned subsidiary of Telenor ASA (NASDAQ:TELN - News), is upgrading and expanding its network with new satellite uplinks powered by Harmonic's IP-based headend solutions. The new systems include the high density, high performance DiviCom® Electra(TM) 5000 encoders, DiviTrackIP(TM) distributed statistical multiplexing and the ProStream(TM) 1000 with ProCipher(TM) technology. In addition, Harmonic and Telenor have signed a frame purchase agreement for future sales of Harmonic products and services to Telenor.

Canal Digital, a 100 percent owned subsidiary of Telenor, is the leading direct-to-home (DTH) satellite operator in the Nordic region, broadcasting more than 200 channels to more than one million households. As part of its plans to upgrade and grow its DTH service, Telenor turned to IP-based technology from Harmonic for its new uplinks. For operators of all types -- satellite, cable, telco and terrestrial -- using native IP systems in the video network provides numerous advantages including greater cost-effectiveness, flexibility, scalability and ease of management.

"Telenor is in a phase where old systems need replacement at the same time as we are expanding our encoding and multiplexing capacities. In the light of the recent technology developments, it became clear to us that the transition to an IP-based headend infrastructure made perfect sense," said Torkel Aamodt Thoresen, Technical Product Manager in Telenor Satellite Broadcasting. "Harmonic's advanced DiviCom encoders and DiviTrackIP distributed statistical multiplexing will give us the flexibility we need. The ProStream 1000 easily supports our advanced remultiplexing and network adaptation requirements, and the Harmonic systems are fully integrated with the conditional access system we use in our network. On top of those benefits, the Harmonic solution, with an open and highly scalable architecture, has plenty of room to grow as we add more channels in the future."

"Telenor and other satellite operators are recognizing the importance of an IP-based architecture as they build their next-generation networks," said Shahar Bar, Director of Satellite and Broadcast Solutions for Harmonic Inc. "The multi-service and multi-codec capabilities of the DiviCom Electra 5000 encoders provide a new level of flexibility for Telenor, allowing them to utilize the established MPEG-2 technology now and upgrade to MPEG-4 AVC encoding in the future, or add low resolution video for more interactive applications such as picture-in-picture. This versatility and performance, combined with the additional bandwidth efficiencies gained using DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing, improves bit-rate efficiency and consequently helps maximize service carrying capacity."

Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT)