SOFTBANK Selects Harmonic for TV over DSL

SOFTBANK Broadmedia Corporation chose a Harmonic digital television headend solution for what is expected to be the world's largest TV over DSL service. Harmonic's DiviCom video compression systems will enable broadcast quality digital TV over DSL to be offered to more than one million Yahoo! BB subscribers. The service, which provides multi-channel broadcast television as well as video-on-demand (VOD), was launched in Tokyo at the end of 2002 and will be extended to other cities in Japan this year. The Harmonic equipment is used primarily for the real time encoding of broadcast channels. The systems will also be used for pre-encoding content, which is then stored on a video server, to support SOFTBANK's VOD service. The systems can compress video to bit-rates as low as 2 Mbps while maintaining a broadcast quality picture. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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