Multiscreen video distribution is about to drive a whole new wave of investment thanks to increasing mobile video traffic that is set to push the market for video transcoding products past $460 million in 2015, according to In-Stat. Harmonic Inc. is positioning itself for the boom with the ProMedia family of software for operators and content companies.
The ProMedia tools optimize live and file-based multiscreen video production and processing for content and service providers with functions that include transcoding, packaging and origination to enable high-quality video creation and delivery of live streaming, live-to-VOD and VOD services to TVs, PCs, tablets, smartphones and other IP-connected devices.
“The industry is at the start of multiscreen delivery and TV Everywhere. Content providers expect in a few years that as much as 75 percent of their content will be available via the new distribution platforms," said Michelle Abraham, research director at In-Stat. “Multiscreen delivery, either directly on the part of content providers, or via pay-TV service providers, is driving a lot of the market for multiformat transcoders. In-Stat expects this to remain the case for the next several years. We define multiscreen as delivering content files or streams to displays of various sizes and resolutions, not just to the TV and the PC."
Today, video content is delivered to multiple devices over unmanaged networks with fluctuating bandwidth. As a result, video delivery must adapt to the bandwidth available on the network, the resolution and screen size of the receiving device, and the decoding capability of the receiver. So in 2010, the file multiformat transcoding market grew by 72 percent due to the growth in multiscreen services from content providers, especially in the United States and EMEA. Subsequently, the expectations for TV Everywhere have brought new vendors to the market in 2011, including ARRIS, Imagine Communications and Thomson Video Networks. And some, like Harmonic, are expanding on existing expertise.
The ProMedia family includes four software products:
- ProMedia Live is a real-time video processing and transcoding system with enhanced H.264 video codec technology developed by Harmonic and optimized for creating high-quality Internet video streams.
- Powered by Rhozet technology, ProMedia Carbon (formerly Carbon Coder) is a file-based transcoder that supports the largest array of acquisition, editing, broadcast, Web, and mobile formats in the industry. The system scales from a single instance to a large automated multinode transcoding farm.
