Harmonic Powers Cutting-Edge OTT Multiscreen Service for Turkish DTH Provider D-Smart

Harmonic announced that D-Smart, a leading Turkish DTH provider owned by Doğan TV Holding, has selected an end-to-end video preparation solution from Harmonic to power its new OTT multiscreen service offering. D-Smart chose Harmonic’s ProMedia™ adaptive bit rate (ABR), WFS™ file-based workflow, and MediaGrid™ shared storage systems. The integrated solution provides the scalability to deliver high-quality live, VOD, and catch-up TV services to any subscriber device, including TVs, PCs, set-top boxes (STBs), smartphones, and tablets.

“Prior to this deployment, our customers were able to watch linear TV from set-top boxes. In order to expand upon our service offering, we needed an integrated comprehensive video preparation solution,” said Erdoğan Şimşek, DTH platform director at D-Smart. “Harmonic provided us with a complete package for encoding, packaging, recording, and playout, making it possible to stream live, VOD, and catch-up TV content to a wide range of devices, efficiently and cost-effectively. Thanks to the intensity and exceptional level of customer support that Harmonic brought to the project, this OTT deployment was a complete success from start to finish.”

The Harmonic multiscreen solution at D-Smart is part of an end-to-end workflow that includes full integration with content management system (CMS) and middleware technologies from KIT Digital, digital rights management (DRM) technology from Discretix, and OTT content delivery network (CDN) services from Broadpeak.

The adaptive streaming services for D-Smart’s new service offering are orchestrated by Harmonic’s ProMedia Live real-time transcoders, which efficiently convert MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC H.264 content to multiple high-quality ABR streams optimized for OTT delivery and multiscreen devices. By splitting encoding across multiple machines, ProMedia Live improves the processing workflow required for delivering streaming video. The platform also handles a variety of metadata information — such as language, captions, ad signaling/insertion — on input and output, further streamlining operations. ProMedia Live is integrated with Harmonic’s ProMedia Package to enable sophisticated transcoding, encapsulation, metadata management and encryption, from a single platform.

D-Smart’s VOD services are powered by Harmonic’s ProMedia Carbon and ProMedia Xpress file-based transcoders. ProMedia Carbon provides a range of critical operations including SD/HD conversion, PAL/NTSC conversion, logo insertion, color space conversion, color correction, and closed-captions extraction. Employing Harmonic’s MicroGrid™ parallel-processing software technology, ProMedia Xpress enables faster-than-real-time transcoding and packaging of broadcast-quality SD and HD video for multiscreen VOD applications. ProMedia Carbon and ProMedia Xpress are controlled by Harmonic’s file-based WFS, which provides automated processing of high-volume transcoding tasks, failover support, job distribution management, job prioritization, load balancing, FTP transfer, status monitoring, and job notification.

Harmonic’s ProMedia Origin and MediaGrid scalable shared storage optimize the delivery of D-Smart’s OTT multiscreen VOD and catch-up TV services leveraging a range of industry-standard protocols, including Apple® HLS, Adobe® HDS, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming. Tight integration between Origin and MediaGrid enable D-Smart to independently scale storage capacity, bandwidth, and streaming capability.

“Turkey is an important country in the video industry and has rapidly growing requirements for video processing and delivery solutions,” said Harout Torossian, regional sales manager, Middle East, Harmonic.

Jakob Hummes, director of presales solutions at Harmonic, added, “The platform deployed by D-Smart is scalable, flexible, and efficient, making it the perfect model for operators wanting to offer next-generation services on a variety of devices. Partnering with a leader like Harmonic, D-Smart will be able to support new standards like MPEG-DASH and HEVC in the future to further increase their service offering and revenue streams.”