WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC, teamed with Harmonic to provide real-time broadcasts of four simultaneous basketball games in 1080i HD to a regional cable operator during the recent NCAA National Collegiate Basketball Tournament. The station is the first TV station to deploy the new Electra 5000 platform for digital television broadcasts.
The simultaneous HD broadcast was made possible by leveraging the ultra-high compression efficiency of Harmonic’s DiviCom MV 500 MPEG-2 encoder. The device allowed the station to provide the delivery of the four simultaneous NCAA basketball games without sacrificing any of the video quality of WRAL’s over-the-air HD and SD TV broadcasts.
WRAL used Harmonic’s IP-based MPEG-2 solutions, including the Electra 5000 multichannel MPEG-2 SD encoders and the ProStream stream processing platform with DiviTrackIP distributed statistical multiplexing capabilities, for its broadcast ATSC service.
Harmonic’s DiviTrackIP unit further enhances bandwidth efficiency by adjusting bit rates of channels in the pool according to the complexity of the video. The entire video infrastructure is managed by Harmonic’s NMX Digital Service Manager, a set of tools for monitoring and managing compressed digital video and audio services.