MANAGEMENT
January 2015
21
FIC Philippines deploys
Harmonic turnkey solution
by jude turcuato
Fox International Channels (FIC)
had installed a turnkey Harmonic
playout solution in our Hong Kong,
Taiwan and Japan office, and the
resulting end-to-end solution
successfully streamlined media
storage, channel branding and
origination of HD and SD chan-
nels. Given how well this Harmonic
solution met both our budget and
our operational goals, we subse-
quently chose to replicate it at FIC
Philippines.
With its rich portfolio of proven
media storage and processing
products, only Harmonic was able
to provide the complete and read-
ily scalable solution we required for
playout. The solution deployed at
our Makati City facility features a
Harmonic Spectrum MediaDeck
integrated media server system,
equipped with Spectrum Channel
Port integrated channel playout,
Harmonic MediaGrid shared stor-
age systems, ProView 7100 inte-
grated receiver-decoders (IRDs),
stream processor and transcoder,
Electra 9200 universal multi-service
encoders, and ProStream 9100
high-density stream processors.
Particularly valuable to our
operations has been the smooth
integration of the ChannelPort sys-
tem with our existing automation
system, which made it easy for us to
realise the functionality needed to
deliver quality branded broadcasts
to our customers. The ChannelPort
system fits seamlessly into our
Harmonic’s MediaGrid shared storage system forms part of the turnkey solution
Fox International Channels Philippines is deploying at its Makati City facility.
The final compression, statistical
multiplexing and delivery stage
is provided by Electra 9200 and
ProStream 9100 media processing
solutions, which help us to max-
imise use of satellite transponder
capacity.
Harmonic has become a trusted
partner, and the ease of system
integration, deployment and ope
ration were all key factors in our
decision to build our FIC Philip-
pines operations on the company’s
products. Video quality was clearly
important, but we also considered
factors such as the reliability and
scalability of the overall solution.
We needed the capacity to expand
our branded channel offerings, as
well as the ability to extend the
reach of our services.
So far, this turnkey solution
from Harmonic has performed just
as anticipated, bringing us many
immediate benefits while opening
the door to further growth.
Jude Turcuato is SVP and general
manager of Fox International
Channels Philippines.
Ross Video provides end-to-end solution
for 4K-capable studio in Singapore
Enhanced
VSNExplorer
now available
Spain’s VSN has added an advanced
optical character recognition (OCR)
system to its VSNExplorer media
and business process management
solution.
With the new addition, us-
ers can automatically catalogue
photog raphs and images from
Web pages and PDF documents.
The VSNExplorer media and
business process management
solution has been developed for
the management of multimedia
content. Its family includes pro-
duction asset management (PAM),
media asset management (MAM)
and business process management
(BPM) modules, covering content
management needs of companies
operating in the broadcast, media
and entertainment industries.
With the new OCR feature,
VSN’s MAM increases performance
and adds automatic catalogu-
ing features without requiring
user commands or actions. This,
said VSN, is a step forward in the
company’s goal of automating
processes to allow users to have
existing production and playout
infrastructures, including a Pebble
Beach automation system, allow-
ing us to reduce the complexity
of our operations. As we expand
our channel line-up, we will have
the ability to launch new channels
with the simple addition of further
ChannelPort modules.
Within our end-to-end work-
flow, we use the Harmonic ProView
7100 IRD to accept FIC contribu-
tion feeds. The Harmonic Media-
Grid provides shared storage for
content, which is edited and trans-
ferred to the MediaDeck server sys-
tem for playout. The ChannelPort
system makes it easy for our staff
to enhance video with rich multi-
layer graphics and to key dynamic
text over live and recorded video.
The VSNExplorer media and business
process management solution has been
added with an advanced OCR (Optical
Character Recognition) system.
more time and better tools to
create quality content.
OCR is a technology that allows
the conversion and digitisation of
texts that are part of the visual con-
tent which companies manage, and
to allow them to extract metadata
so as to adequately classify them.
With the OCR feature, VSN’s
MAM is now capable of managing
content without requiring users’
supervision, increasing efficiency
and workflows speed performance.
Manuel Escribano, VSN’s CTO,
said: “The market demands this
feature. At VSN, we develop our
solutions with a strict protocol
focused on the priorities of our
clients, always meeting their needs
to discover the latest innovations to
make their work easier.”
Infinite Studios, an integrated
media entertainment and creative
services company based in Singa-
pore, has chosen an end-to-end
solution from Ross Video for its
full HD virtual studio located at
the Mediapolis digital hub in the
republic.
The Infinite Studios’ virtual
studio includes the Ross UX aug-
mented reality and virtual set so-
lution for virtual solutions control,
XPression real-time 3D graphics
platform for graphics render-
ing, a Furio robotic dolly-based
camera system, and a Ross NK
route