Virgin Media Taps Harmonic For Olympics Coverage
Now that the Diamond Jubilee events have ended, the next big global event will be the Summer Olympics in London. Virgin Media will be using a range of Harmonic video-processing solutions to power its HD channel delivery in the U.K., including HD coverage of the Olympics from the BBC.
During the games, U.K. broadcaster BBC will supply Virgin Media with the live HD BBC Olympic channels. The content will be encoded by Harmonic’s Electra 8000 encoder that supports both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC compression, enabling Virgin Media to deliver 24 high-quality HD BBC Olympic channels dedicated solely to Olympic Games coverage. high-quality video to subscribers via Virgin Media’s fiber-rich cable infrastructure.
Notes Neil Drennan, director/TV Engineering at Virgin Media, "With a full range of live channels in HD from the BBC, Virgin Media customers will be spoiled with a superb viewer experience for the London Olympics. Thanks to Harmonic’s high-performance yet bandwidth-saving encoding and management software solutions, our TV customers can now watch even more live sports coverage in breathtaking HD quality."
Adds Ian Graham, vice president/Europe and Middle East sales at Harmonic, "Our sophisticated family of encoding solutions offers the superior video quality desired as well as a high-density, bandwidth-saving design that is instrumental in allowing Virgin Media to add this additional capacity with minimal headend space."