Armada™ Asset Manager

With the variety of new personalized television services now available from cable, satellite and telco providers, a wide selection of on-demand content is needed, in various formats. In addition, thousands of video assets have to be efficiently and cost-effectively stored, distributed and replicated around the clock (even around the world) to satisfy consumers’ demands. Yet, managing content movement and storage is complicated because assets are expensive to transmit and replicate, planned transmission schedules are subject to power outages and it’s not always possible to accurately predict in advance which programs will be the most popular.

To help content providers meet these challenges and more, Harmonic’s Armada® RT is an innovative software solution that goes beyond traditional content distribution systems to incorporate a higher degree of organizational intelligence and automation capabilities.

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Highlights

  • Highly automated failsafe operation for:
    • Centralized management of distributed video servers
    • Automated asset replication in on-demand environments
    • Optimization of bandwidth and storage sources
  • Operates over IP networks
  • Uses advanced multicast distribution for increased efficiency

Cost-Effective Streaming and Storage

The choice of where and in what type of media to store any given asset is simple with a limited offering of similar assets, but quickly becomes unmanageable for a large set of assets to manage across multiple servers. The popularity of new movie releases varies widely over the first few weeks and the timing of when to move the various streaming choices is important. Harmonic’s Armada addresses these issues. Armada provides powerful tools for scheduled asset replication and pre-caching assets prior to use. By optimizing network bandwidth and asset storage resources, the software increases efficiency while decreasing costs. It also helps improve customer satisfaction and reduces operations complexity by automating tasks, especially failure recovery. As an added bonus, Armada’s dynamic capabilities constantly monitor customer behavior and make necessary adjustments to meet changing needs. For example, a breaking news story or celebrity scandal might unexpectedly increase demand for certain titles. Armada’s dynamic asset replication capabilities constantly detect changes in consumer behavior and schedule asset replication accordingly. The result is smoother system operations and greater customer satisfaction.

In today’s ever-increasing on-demand world, service providers now rely heavily on pre-determined schedules and timelines for the error-free capture, distribution and playout of assets. That’s why Armada includes several tools for event scheduling. Whether events happen one time, daily or on a recurring basis, Armada makes it simple for operators to schedule tasks from a single location and designate multiple remote sites. Content removal can also be automated by pre-defined rules and dynamic operations based on asset popularity.

Easing Bandwidth Constraints

Distributing video assets can put a strain on network resources. Armada exploits any type of network’s point-to-multipoint capabilities, allowing one transmission session to serve a large number of remote sites. By reducing the number of point-to-point transmissions, Armada’s multicast capabilities help minimize bandwidth requirements and expedite asset propagation. As a result, remote sites receive asset updates sooner and transmission costs are reduced.

Events and viewing behavior can’t always be predicted in a distributed network environment, so Armada continually monitors customer requests and allocate streaming resources closest to the customers. This enables effective deployment of the StreamLiner® platform in a distributed network environment such that most streaming requests are served by the closest servers in the network, relieving strain on the network bandwidth from any particular sites.