Of all the contract news at IPTV World Forum in London this week, the most impressive deal for encoder company Harmonic was the upgrading of Hong Kong Quad play telco PCCW to an HD platform.
The deal was based on Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra 7000 MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoders to which will send HD to one of the biggest IPTV subscriber bases in the world, with 882,000 subscribers.
PCCW already uses Harmonic standard definition encoders and delivers more than 150 broadcast channels, and was the contract around which VoD server business Entone was formed, which is now part of Harmonic.
The PCCW equipment will run HD in under 6 Mbps and that means that most of the Hong Kong customer base can get the HD channels. Harmonic says that already the Electra 7000 is delivering 1,500 HD channels in IPTV environments globally.
Back in March last year we revealed that the Harmonic HD effort was powered by a new generation of specialist chips from Ambarella, originally designed to encode for video cameras. The Ambarella System on a Chip came from a team of long standing chip and codec engineers from companies like C-Cube and LSI, and now it threatens to flatten the landscape in encoding, with many of the largest encoder manufacturers relying on a chip which offers its own pre-processing and codec. Harmonic was the first to embrace it, followed by Tandberg and Modulus, now part of Motorola, which each have at least one HD product line based on it.
Harmonic says that the chip offers constant bit rate or variable bit rate H.264 video and is claimed to give a 20% compression gain over DSP-based encoders.
The corporate connection to Harmonic goes back to inventor Fermi Wang who co-founded Ambarella in 2004 targeting the encoder and digital video camera markets. Wang comes originally out of C-Cube, a company that was acquired by Divicom that in turn formed the basis of the Harmonic encoder range before the remnants of the company were sold off to LSI Logic. C-Cube was one of the key companies behind the original MPEG 2 work, and Wang still holds some of the core patents.
Wang’s last venture was at Afara Websystems, a startup that was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and its technology is the basis of the multi-core, multi-threaded CPU design being harnessed by Sun in its UltraSPARCs.
The key difference as we understand it is that the SoCs can analyze a frame in one slice. When you use a Texas Instrument DSP, or any of the existing DSP designs, it needs to break it up into 6 or 7 slices and process each one, one at a time. But just because Harmonic got to the Ambarella first it doesn’t mean that it will have the last say. The chipset is flattening out the differentiation that each encoder manufacturer can offer, and the rest of the non-Ambarella companies use a combination of DSPs, Intel processors, the IBM Cell chip and are often supported by FPGAs.
Harmonic also announced at the show an upgrade at Tiscali UK, for the encoders on what used to be the Homechoice IPTV service recently renamed Tiscali TV. That will use DiviCom Electra 5400 standard definition (SD) encoders as Tiscali TV is rolled out to parts of the UK outside of London, to reach some 10 million potential homes in major cities throughout the UK.
The idea seems to be to upgrade its encoding, free up some network bandwidth so that later it can find room for HD as well as other triple play elements.