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Harmonic and NASA Launch North America’s First 4K UHD Television Channel

24 November 2015

“There’s still no content!” This remains the battle cry of 4K Ultra HD (UHD) naysayers, and the single largest obstacle to the widespread adoption of 4K UHD for consumers.

That is beginning to change with the introduction of NASA TV in 4K UHD resolution, the first consumer Ultra HD channel available in North America. The new ambient video channel provides viewers with a wide array of linear 2160p60 content capturing the beauty of space and various facets of the national space program in eight new original series’.

NASA TV UHD leverages an end-to-end UHD delivery system from Harmonic, a worldwide provider of video delivery infrastructure for emerging TV and video services.

Transmitted via the SES AMC-18C satellite, the NASA TV UHD broadcast utilizes an end-to-end solution that includes Harmonic's Ellipse 3000 contribution encoder, ProView 7100 integrated receiver-decoder (IRD), MediaGrid shared storage system, Polaris playout management suite, Spectrum X advanced media server system, ProMedia Origin packager and streaming video server, NSG Exo distributed CCAP system and Electra X2 and Electra X3 advanced media processors. Powered by the Harmonic PURE Compression Engine, an advanced encoding technology that supports resolutions up to 2160p60 (HEVC Main 10) for broadcast and Oover-the-top (OTT) multi-screen delivery, the Electra X3 enables superior video quality at minimum bandwidth.

Harmonic is currently in discussions with pay-TV operators to carry the channel on their satellite DTH, cable and optical networks. Tests are underway to enable consumption on a wide range of television and IP-connected devices. The channel may also be available for OTT streaming at a later date. Watch the trailer here: http://info.harmonicinc.com/nasa-uhd.

To contact the author of this article, email engineering360editors@ihs.com



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