Few expected Harmonic, a video infrastructure company in a precarious state of flux, to announce one of the biggest customer deals of NAB Show 2026.
Harmonic, in the process of selling its video technology division to rival MediaKind, has been selected by US satellite TV operator DirecTV, a company not unaccustomed to turmoil of its own, for a major broadcast playout upgrade.
With DirecTV estimated to have fewer than 9 million viewers remaining today, across both satellite and streaming, down from its peak of around 20 million subs in 2010, the company is not the powerhouse it once was. Even so, the reach and influence of its approximately 185 channels, spanning sports, news, and entertainment, is far from insignificant.
DirecTV plans to reduce costs while improving video quality across its US-only linear channels via satellite distribution, using Harmonic’s VOS Media Software. Harmonic will switch out existing siloed systems with a software-based playout-to-delivery platform—covering playout, ingest, ad insertion, branding, encoding, and statmux in one system.
Interestingly, Ericsson was once a long-term supplier of TV technologies to DirecTV. The vendor’s Tandberg Television division supported MPEG-4 AVC HD encoding for HD channels across DirecTV’s US expansion effort from 2005 onwards, when it became the first DTH provider in North America to launch HD services.
A decade later, in 2015, Ericsson was tapped again by DirecTV to expand its satellite TV platform as well as AT&T’s broader video infrastructure, including U-verse IPTV, in a deal timed around AT&T’s $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV. This phase also followed Ericsson’s acquisition of Envivio in 2015, strengthening its multiscreen encoding portfolio.
Further disruption followed when Ericsson spun out its video business and formally rebranded it as MediaKind in 2018. It is not entirely clear how long Ericsson/MediaKind’s relationship with DirecTV persisted through the AT&T integration years, but the vendor’s lineage remains deeply embedded in the operator’s encoding and compression stack.
Now, with MediaKind in the process of acquiring Harmonic’s video business for $145 million, just as Harmonic has secured a new role in modernizing DirecTV’s DTH playout-to-delivery workflow, we see the same functional layer being handed between competing vendors over successive technology cycles.
Later this year, MediaKind will inherit the DirecTV contract, almost bringing the company full circle over 20 years.
Against this backdrop, we can see a ten-year innovation loop, where encoding, playout and compression responsibilities rotate between a small set of vendors, each iteration promising consolidation, and each ending in another reset.
Harmonic is now in the driving seat for the modernized playout platform, cleaning up DirecTV’s multifaceted and messy playout stack.
OmniBus Systems, now part of Grass Valley, was a key supplier in DirecTV’s HD expansion, providing iTX automation and playout services.
For select DirecTV Latin America channels, wTVision and Unitecnic have historically provided playout services to develop SD and HD channels, managing complex channel architectures and integrating with existing broadcast technologies from Grass Valley (video servers), Miranda (master control switcher), and Snell (routers).
However, Harmonic’s announcement is explicitly a US-focused DTH video platform upgrade, and is not (for now) geared towards DirecTV Latam, which is operated by Vrio Corp. Harmonic will be working hard to expand this deal from a US-only account into a global customer.
Avid Technology has provided MediaStream servers at the core of DirecTV’s playout operations in earlier deployments. Back in 2006, DirecTV spent a cool $1 million on upgrading its Avid system to MediaStream servers, but has spent a lot more with Avid over the years.
With Harmonic, DirecTV has collapsed this all into one system, moving from a best-of-breed playout chain to a consolidated model that is software-defined.
It appears these Grass Valley/Avid-based systems are being replaced by Harmonic’s software-based platform—a notable change from DirecTV to rely on a single primary playout supplier instead of building and maintaining a multi-vendor playout ecosystem.
VOS Media Software will be deployed on-prem in a private DirecTV datacenter, which tells us that DirecTV is not ready for a full public or hybrid cloud deployment yet, likely because of a cost backlash, as the announcement highlights cost reduction as a central to Harmonic’s selection.
On the encoding side, highlighted in the announcement are Harmonic’s AI-driven encoding and advanced compression capabilities.
In monetary terms, the size of the DirecTV deal has not been made public, but it is certainly a commercial boost for MediaKind as the merger of these two heavyweight infrastructure firms chugs along.
In 2021, then owner AT&T spun off DirecTV, which involved a complex private equity arrangement with TPG Capital, initially taking a 30% stake but soon to absorb AT&T’s remaining 70% stake in DirecTV. TPG Capital acquired the remaining 70% in DirecTV from AT&T in July 2025, making it a fully independent company.
DirecTV is not the only major broadcaster to be undergoing a major playout upgrade. In the UK, confidential sources have informed Faultline of a transmission crisis at some of the country’s top brass in broadcast. We will be building out this story as pieces come together over the coming weeks.