LIVEcut™ Scheduler

Consumer reaction to the convenience of watching television programming free of pre-scheduled time restrictions is driving profound changes in the technology platforms employed by PayTV service operators in the competitive TV services marketplace. Wide adoption of DVR-based time shifting combined with the growing abundance of Internet-delivered TV programming has shifted consumers expectations toward immediate access to a vast range of entertainment options at the click of a button. In response, TV service providers are maximizing their ability to flexibly transition to more on-demand content by evolving their distribution platforms away from distinct infrastructures for broadcast and on-demand programming.

New and advanced on-demand services are now being offered that are based on live broadcast TV content such as Time-shifted TV or network PVR. The capability to ingest live broadcast TV content for on-demand viewing not only extends the availability of the broadcast content, but also evolves the potential for new applications and more effective targeted advertising enabled by the on-demand platform.

Harmonic’s LIVEcut™ is a live ingest solution that enables operators to extend on-demand services by automating capture of live broadcast TV content.

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Highlights

  • Fully integrated IP-based live ingest solution of broadcast TV content:
    • Define schedules for capturing live broadcast channels
    • Configure Upstream staging processors such as the ProStream 1000 Mentor for converting broadcast content to appropriate CBR format
    • Notification of new assets to middleware / BMS based on standard protocols
    • Efficient distribution of ingested content to multiple Harmonic StreamLiner servers

Cost-effective IP-based Solution

The LIVEcut ingest solution from Harmonic is an IP- based solution that avoids unnecessary complexity and use of legacy live ingest solutions based on non-compressed sources. Operators simply need to define the channels that need to be recorded among the existing pool of broadcast channels. With the LIVEcut software, operators can avoid additional network setup costs regardless of the increase in the number of broadcast channels for recording.

Flexible Scheduling

Harmonic’s LIVEcut supports different types of scheduling to facilitate the wide range of live TV on demand applications. Both rule-based scheduling based on scheduled events or fixed time-sliced scheduling are supported. Different scheduling mechanisms can be defined for different broadcast channels. Incoming schedules can either be imported from standard format EPG schedules or created manually through LIVEcut’s extensive user interface.

Fully Integrated Solution

Live content is often broadcast in variable bit-rate VBR mode, allowing network operators to realize considerable bandwidth savings from use of statistical multiplexing techniques. In order to ingest the live VBR content into the on-demand platform operators must convert the content into constant bit-rate (CBR) mode. To address this challenge, Harmonic has introduced a new product tailored for the purpose of VBR-to-CBR conversions. The platform known as the ProStream™ 1000 stream processing platform with Mentor™ re-encoding technology is a dense re-encoder solution capable of full decode and re-encode of up to 32 SD channels in a single 1RU with outstanding video quality. Harmonic’s LIVEcut is fully integrated with the Mentor platform enabling operators to control the content preparation and ingest of live broadcast channels from a single point in the network.

Efficient Content Distribution

LIVEcut is designed to operate in a multitude of VOD environments. It can be deployed with legacy VOD platforms by exposing a standard ADI interface as content becomes available, or operate within a complete Harmonic on-demand platform based on the StreamLiner® VOD server and Armada® content distribution engine. Both solutions take advantage of LIVEcut’s advanced ingest and scheduling capabilities, while the latter offers more advanced content distribution to edge StreamLiner servers with Armada’s reactive content distribution algorithms.

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