IPTV

On Demand

Personalized Viewing Experience

Video On-Demand - where movies or shows are available to customers either via PVR or nPVR at any time - as well as the user interface contribute to creating a personalized viewing experience. The PIP technology, largely democratized by Microsoft and supported by Harmonic’s Electra product family, enable users to receive, in addition to the main program (SD or HD), a low resolution version of the channel that can be used for preview, program guide navigation or creating a personalized mosaic. Ultimately each user will be able to create their own video portal. VOD, which by definition is a unicast session, also offers opportunities for delivering personalized ads. It is interesting to note that personalized ads in a multicast session are also possible but would require a tight integration with the DSLAMs at the Central Office level.

VOD

Harmonic has been at the forefront of the On-Demand evolution for years. It started with the use of IP edge QAM devices (Narrowcast Services Gateway™) in cable environments and later with solutions such as switched digital broadcast and scalable HFC network segmentation. With the addition of a high-performance software suite from Harmonic, Harmonic now offers a broad range of solutions ideal for advanced on-demand services such as time-shifted TV and Network PVR. By capturing, processing and delivering both offline and live content Telco operators can now easily expand their service offering and provide users with a completely personalized viewing experience. Subscribers can view their favorite programs and movies any time, which gives Telco operators a significant advantage over legacy PayTV service offerings.

Adding On-Demand services to an IPTV environment is actually straightforward and a natural evolution from existing Broadcast services. Using standards-based servers running Harmonic’s On-Demand software suite, operators can easily transition to an On-Demand service offering. Harmonic’s solution also offers a high level of flexibility as the system handles MPEG-2, MPEG-4 H.264, SD or HD sources as well as outputs.

Offline Content

Offline content is gathered from content providers via standard catcher platforms. Harmonic’s Ingest Gateway then processes the offline content and pushes it toward the VOD network. Assets are delivered to the distributed edge video servers based on network constraints and consumer demand for each piece of content. With this solution known as Armada™ pre-guessing which content will be more popular in a particular region becomes a non-issue. Furthermore, Armada constantly minimizes asset replication by analyzing consumer demand, which reduces storage investments.

Live Content

Second-generation On-Demand services, also called “Live VOD” and including Time- Shifted TV and Network PVR, can be easily added. The live content is encoded with Harmonic’s CLEARcut storage encoding workstation. Harmonic’s Ingest Datapath platform ingests and processes real-time feeds from broadcast services and delivers them to the same VOD server network. Armada’s intelligent asset distribution engine manages real-time ingested content in a similar way to offline content. This significantly minimizes storage needs as live content could consume a tremendous amount of storage space.

MOSAIC

Headend-based Mosaic

The viewing experience can be greatly enhanced with Harmonic’s Mosaic solution allowing for up to 20 high quality video channels to be presented in a video portal. Ideal for event, program or channel promotion, it has been proven to increase take rates. The system handles MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 H.264 channels, metadata and easily integrates with any middleware. Headend-based Mosaic solutions are already widely deployed in cable environments but are also starting to be adopted by Telco operators. The headend-based Mosaic is supported by Harmonic's Electra encoder family and enables operators to offer a video portal while controlling what channels are presented.

Client-based Mosaic

In the case of a client-based Mosaic viewers select the channels that will be part of their portal and can create an almost unlimited number of thumbnails. This solution requires a special feature in the STB (e.g. Microsoft STB).