Green Dot Expands Terrestrial TV Service with Harmonic's Video Systems

Harmonic (News - Alert) Inc. announced that its video delivery systems has helped Trinidad and Tobago based telecommunications solutions provider Green Dot expand their terrestrial, or “DVB-T,” television services.

 

Harmonic provides systems for delivering live and on-demand video to TVs, PCs and mobile devices. The company said that its HD and SD compression, stream processing and asset management systems with native IP support allow operators to intelligently manage service flows across their networks while maximizing network bandwidth and operational efficiencies.

 

Green Dot has deployed the Harmonic IP-based headend system at St. James, Trinidad and from there it offers over 80 MPEG-4 AVC Green Dot TV channels to thousands of subscribers across the island.

 

Ketan Patel, CEO at Green Dot, said that Harmonic provided them with the highest quality and most flexible solution for their growing Green Dot TV broadcast offering. The Harmonic system was extremely simple to deploy and offered excellent performance and stability, benefits which were critical to their introduction of additional TV channels and in preparation for a future rollout of high definition video services.

 

The Green Dot service is sent to a mountaintop tower via IP microwave link, and in turn transmitted throughout Trinidad and Tobago via DVB-T signal. The high performance DiviCom Electra 5400 Encoder, Harmonic’s third generation MPEG-4 AVC standard definition encoder integrated with DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing technology is being used for delivering high quality variable bit-rate, or “VBR,” services with optimized bandwidth efficiency.

 

Green Dot has utilized the ProView 2900 integrated receiver decoder, a broadcast-quality decoder and interface converter for content reception. And for configuring, monitoring and managing compressed digital video and audio services Green Dot has installed Harmonic’s NMX Digital Service Manager.

 

Harmonic officials said that Green Dot is an apt model to demonstrate how telecom providers can leverage advanced video stream processing technologies to deliver competitive broadcast television services. Green Dot is positioned to provide customers across Trinidad and Tobago with a growing range of channels, improving viewer choice without compromising the viewing experience by building its broadcast operations on Harmonic’s flexible headend solutions.

 

Recently Harmonic announced availability of ACE technology on ProStream 1000 Stream processing platform and Harmonic helped Altibox enable advanced IPTV (News - Alert) offering in Norway.