“It is a sobering story, but the real story at our customers is not UltraHD, but operational expenses, and how to reduce them, how to reduce the number of people and increase automation.”
Krish Padmanabhan, SVP of product management, told Broadband TV news following the vendors annual IBC press conference.
“Our customers are scared, as business models (of linear channels) are disrupted, and they don’t know how there business will grow in two years from now”. the past twenty years.”
The key message of the conference was we are the leaders in market size in all areas from play-out to Edge-QAM, so we lead in flexibility and elasticity to help operators and broadcasters monetize next generation video services. Basically ‘we have the biggest rubber band’. “You may joke about that, but actually the rubber band matters” Padmanabhan, continued.
To explain what Harmonic means by ‘Elasticity and Flexibility’, it highlighted several customers. Fox Sports 1, recently launched in the US to take on ESPN and UFC, needs to launch channels rapidly and efficiently. So one single platform that takes care of play-out and encoding. That can handle both the existing linear channel, but also do the live or on-demand webstreaming, in AVC, and later HEVC. Functional collapse, with products that offer elastic capacity in the number and type of channels, storage history and streaming capacity, with each part of the equation able to increase or decrease as required.
“Coming up with a new service, but saying I need five million dollars will get you fired, saying I can do this with the infrastructure we already have will launch the service”, according to Padmanabhan. Adding “you can no longer offer expensive and inflexible technology”.
Newly launched movie on demand and linear TV portal Total Movie, offers its service across Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina, needs to be able to scale very easily and quickly to match demand and content rights for a large number of markets.
Tivo’s VP of Innovation, Joshua Danovitz told his new service “is not just cloud plus IP, but more complex a match between content rights and associated business rules and the consumer experience, with the consumer expecting his content on any screen”. Connecting all the libraries to the consumer, firstly is a “whole transition to IP, not just cloud recording, before that there is linear TV and SVOD over IP.
With Tata of India, a global fiber operator and video service provider, Harmonic launched a transcoding service that offers global video transcoding as a service via Tata’s global fiber network. Offering the ultimate in flexibility and scalability.