MUMBAI: The largest electronic media organisation in Switzerland, SRG SSR, has selected a combination of Harmonic’s multifunction video encoders, stream processing solutions, and management tools to power its new HDTV services.

The Harmonic solutions deployed for the new DVB-S system provide the video quality, bandwidth efficiencies, and flexibility to enable SRG SSR to begin its migration to HD, while continuing to provide legacy channels until the transition is complete.

SRG SSR project manager, distribution/engineering media services Andre Frank said, "Harmonic’s video compression and processing solutions deliver the flexibility and quality to successfully address the challenges of migrating services from SD to HD over the next three to five years. Additionally, the Electra® 8000 is designed to reclaim bandwidth by increasing the channel count per transponder while maintaining video quality, so we can continue to expand our HD services well into the future."

 
The Electra 8000 encoders provide SGR SSR with SD and HD, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC encoding, as well as integrated statistical multiplexing.

 
The Electra 8000’s architecture, featuring up to four channels in a single rack unit, reduces operational costs for SGR SSR with its high density and power efficiency.
SRG SSR is using Harmonic’s ProStream 1000 stream processing platform for bulk scrambling and NMX Digital Service Manager for easy configuration, control, and monitoring of Harmonic and third-party video network elements.

Installation of the system was performed by Euromedia Service GmbH, a leading systems integrator and Harmonic reseller based in Germany.