Harmonic ProStream 1000 Powers HD and SD Video for PRTC's 290-Channel IPTV Service

Harmonic (News - Alert) Inc. announced that Palmetto Rural Telephone Cooperative (PRTC) of Walterboro, S.C., has picked the Harmonic ProStream 1000 with ACE high-density, real-time transcoder to power HD and SD video for its 290-channel IPTV service, based on the Microsoft (News - Alert) Mediaroom platform.

Harmonic provides infrastructure that powers the video economy. Its solutions help content and service providers to create, prepare, and deliver differentiated video services for television and new media platforms.

Tony Stout, CTO, at Palmetto Rural Telephone Cooperative said in a release, “It would have taken over a dozen devices from other vendors to provide the breadth of functionality found in the one rack unit ProStream 1000 with ACE.”

“Harmonic’s ProStream with ACE technology gave us a cost-effective, highly flexible solution that delivers excellent video quality for our Mediaroom deployment, helping us gain a competitive advantage,” Stout added.

According to officials the ProStream 1000 with ACE “any-to-any, any-to-many” real-time transcoding solution offers PRTC with Microsoft picture-in-picture (PIP) capability and support for HD and SD.

It also provides support for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video and audio transcoding of up to 20 HD or 60 SD channels all encompassed in a compact and power-efficient one rack unit (1 RU) chassis. The platform’s high density capabilities lets PRTC meet the growing demand for digital TV services.

Chris White, manager of telco sales in North America for Harmonic Inc. said, “Harmonic is working with a diverse group of service operators on numerous deployments to provide high-quality, bandwidth-efficient IPTV (News - Alert) video services. We were able to leverage this extensive experience to provide PRTC with a powerful, efficient solution that can easily scale with their business needs.”

Harmonic is a Microsoft Mediaroom ecosystem partner. It specializes in powering the video headends for several Microsoft IPTV customers. Harmonic also delivers over 13,000 IPTV channels globally and serves the needs of over 100 telco operators. Harmonic plans to showcase the ProStream 1000 with ACE at TelcoTV 2011 in New Orleans which is scheduled to take place from October 25 to 27, 2011.

Recently, Harmonic announced that Crawford Media Services Inc., a provider of premium post-production services and media management solutions to domestic and international clients, has deployed the Omneon MediaGrid active storage system with MXFserver to support a collaborative multiplatform editing environment within its new 80,000-square-foot facility in Atlanta, Georgia.