Philippines pay-TV provider Cignal TV has modernised its channel origination, playout and disaster recovery workflows by adopting the VOS 360 Media SaaS from Harmonic.
Pay-TV provider Cignal TV in the Philippines has modernised its channel origination, playout and disaster recovery workflows by adopting the VOS 360 Media SaaS from Harmonic. Running on the public cloud, Cignal TV uses Harmonic’s service to deliver video streaming and broadcast services to subscribers, resulting in greater efficiency and reliability.
“Harmonic’s approach to cloud-native media processing is a key strategy guiding the modernization of our video streaming and broadcast workflows,” said Caesar Villadiego, head of media and telecoms engineering at Cignal TV. “Harmonic’s VOS360 Media SaaS uses its cloud environment to afford greater flexibility, agility and scalability - enabling us to launch streaming services in hours instead of days.”
Flexible Cloud-Native Platform
Deployed in collaboration with local partner Composite Technology, Harmonic’s VOS360 Media combines a range of media processing functions in a single cloud-native platform, which makes Cignal TV’s video operations simpler and keeps infrastructure costs relatively low. The platform supports the delivery of linear TV channels and broadcast services, with capabilities for live distribution available for the future, which increases flexibility in Cignal TV’s operations.
VOS360 Media transcoding brings two special capabilities. The PURE Compression Engine for broadcast and OTT delivery – supporting formats up to UHD, and MPEG and HEVC codecs – outputs high video quality at the lowest possible bit rates and latency. Harmonic EyeQ content-aware encoding uses AI techniques to deliver consistent, competitive video quality for IPTV and OTT services with, according to Harmonic, a reduction in bandwidth of up 50 per cent. This process is built with artificial intelligence techniques to enhance video quality at a lower bit rate and higher density.
When it comes to packaging, multiple formats are supported so that content can be seen on virtually any device or social platform. Integrating VOS360 origin with a third-party CMS is also simple due to the VOS API. Online documentation and samples are supplied online, and since many VOS360 integrations now exist, many CMS types are covered already.
Real-time Scaling
When handling peak viewing, real-time scaling through redundancy is available that optimises live video delivery – redundant clouds using a cloud agnostic design, source redundancy and multi-CDN path diversity. This approach makes delivery resilient enough, end-to-end, to reach millions of simultaneous viewers.
The Harmonic SaaS enables Cignal TV to remotely switch their local playout operations to the cloud for disaster recovery. Utilising a secure SRT connection, the VOS360 platform delivers channels from the cloud to Cignal TV’s compression headend or disaster recovery site without service disruption. This provision allows Cignal TV to assure viewers of service continuity, consistency and high availability.
“Our collaboration with Cignal TV demonstrates Harmonic’s ability to help media service providers build agile, cloud-native solutions for video streaming and broadcast delivery,” said Tony Berthaud, vice president of sales, APAC, at Harmonic. “Using our VOS360 platform, Cignal TV can take advantage of the speed, reliability and efficiency of the cloud to bring its vision for scalable, flexible, secure video operations to life.”
Harmonic will demonstrate VOS360 Media SaaS at Broadcast Asia, 27-29 May in Singapore. www.harmonicinc.com
