MUMBAI: Harmonic Inc. announced that direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television provider DirecTV, Inc. has selected the DiviCom MV 100 standard definition encoder for new MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) based video services.

The most widely deployed MPEG-4 AVC-enabled encoder in the industry, the advanced technology of the MV 100 makes it possible to generate superior full resolution digital video. DirecTV is also utilising Harmonic's DiviTrackXE statistical multiplexing solution and NMX Digital Service Manager, a unique service-oriented video infrastructure monitoring and control system.

"Harmonic is a long-time video headend solution partner to DirecTV. Harmonic's DiviCom MV 100, which is being deployed to encode channels using MPEG-4 AVC, combined with the DiviTrackXE statistical multiplexing system is a technically advanced video compression solution," said DirecTV chief technology officer Romulo Pontual.

"In the competitive North American market where there is a constant demand for new services, Harmonic's digital video solutions offer DirecTV improved flexibility. Worldwide, our DiviCom MV 100 systems are powering more real-time and storage encoding applications for satellite DTH and content distribution services than any other platform. DirecTV's selection of the MV 100 attests to the system's advanced capabilities and Harmonic's market leadership in ready-to-deploy MPEG-4 solutions," said Harmonic Inc executive vice president Patrick Harshman.

The unique architecture of the MV 100 permits operators to select from a range of compression cores -- MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC or SMPTE VC-1 -- according to their unique technical requirements. Field-installable software modules allow an easy and cost-effective transition from one compression technology to another in a timeframe most appropriate to the operator's business, in addition to continuous performance and video quality improvements.

Harmonic's DiviTrackXE closed-loop statistical multiplexing system dynamically allocates bandwidth to each channel based on the complexity of the video being encoded, making it possible to achieve a significant scaling of channel density. NMX Digital Service Manager offers a powerful set of tools designed to streamline problem detection, analysis and resolution, implement advanced redundancy architectures, automate service and resource scheduling, as well as to facilitate system installation and configuration.