Harmonic won the ‘Contribution to Streaming Video Excellence’ category at this year’s Videonet Connected TV Awards with its VOS360 Live Streaming Platform. To accompany our streaming focused coverage from Videoscape Europe 2020, here are more details about the winning solution.
“The nature of live video streaming is changing. Video service providers, content owners and broadcasters are delivering more live video streaming content, including premium sports events, to subscribers. To keep pace with demands, they need smarter, faster and simpler ways to deliver live video streaming services. Achieving fast scaling for live video streaming is a challenge, as is bandwidth efficiency. In addition, service providers must ensure exceptional quality from source to screen.
Harmonic is transforming the way in which service providers, content owners and broadcasters deliver live OTT services with its VOS360 Live Streaming Platform. Winner of the Connected TV Award in the category of “Contribution to Streaming Video Excellence,” Harmonic’s VOS360 platform is the world’s most advanced, fully managed live streaming platform.
Leveraging the flexibility of cloud-native infrastructures, the VOS360 platform is helping service providers meet the most demanding and complex requirements for media processing and delivery. Using the VOS360 platform, service providers can simplify operations and unleash the power of premium OTT services for TV everywhere, stream premium live sports events to millions of subscribers, leverage targeted advertising to increase ROI, improve time-to-market, and reduce operational cost and complexity. Several unique features and benefits of the VOS360 Live Streaming Platform contributed to it winning the award, which are discussed in more detail below.
Low latency
A key ingredient for delivering exceptional-quality live video streaming is end-to-end latency, especially for live sports. Harmonic has made significant improvements in this area, bringing down the latency for OTT delivery to a level comparable to broadcast. Harmonic’s VOS360 platform ensures exceptionally low latency for live video streaming by complying with the DASH CMAF and HLS Low Latency specifications. In stark contrast to the industry norm of 30 to 90 seconds, these new standards enable a remarkable end-to-end delay of five to nine seconds.
Reduced streaming congestion
Another area where the VOS360 platform offers innovation is bandwidth efficiency. Broadband congestion is multiplying at a rate that has never been seen before. Excessive demand for advanced video services and video communications is overburdening networks and storage.
Harmonic’s VOS360 Live Streaming Platform leverages the company’s EyeQ, an AI/ML-based content-aware encoding (CAE) technology, to deliver OTT services at a lower bit rate. By deploying Harmonic’s EyeQ CAE with VOS360 platform, OTT service providers can guarantee superior quality for viewers while reducing bandwidth requirements by up to 50% compared with traditional encoding methods.
Increased scalability
In the OTT environment, scalability is critical. Harmonic has made significant strides in solving scalability issues for live video streaming with its VOS360 platform. The VOS360 platform provides flexible and real-time scaling so that operators can handle peak viewing. A range of technologies dynamically selects the best available paths between multiple public content delivery networks and caching clusters. In addition, Harmonic’s VOS360 platform features a groundbreaking delivery capability that provides real-time scalability and decreased costs for mission-critical, high-demand live video streaming services via dynamic CDN selection. Harmonic’s VOS360 platform leverages multiple delivery paths, giving operators the power and the confidence to scale rapidly while economically supporting the quality demands of premium, live video streaming.
Real-world use cases
Harmonic’s VOS360 platform is more than just a solution: it is substantiated by real-world deployments. The fully managed solution runs on a wide range of public cloud platforms all over the globe and powers millions of simultaneous streams, thousands of live channels, countless video on demand requests and hundreds of petabytes of storage and delivery.
Pushing forward innovation for live streaming experiences, Harmonic was one of the first to demonstrate and deploy UHD HDR and 8K for OTT. During an international tennis tournament in France, Harmonic and partners delivered the first ever live 8K broadcast on 5G networks for a premium sports event.
Leading live streaming innovation
Harmonic’s VOS360 Live Streaming Platform is empowering customers to champion better-quality live streaming experiences by simplifying all stages of the media processing and delivery chain. From source to screen, Harmonic’s VOS360 platform ensures superior video quality with low latency, reduced streaming congestion and rapid scalability.”
