Harmonic Inc. (NASDAQ: HLIT) announced that SKY Brasil, Brazil’s largest HD pay-TV service provider in Latin America with approximately two million subscribers, has expanded its HDTV service based on Harmonic’s market-leading Electra(r) 8000 multi-channel universal encoder. SKY Brasil launched its HDTV service last year using Harmonic's award-winning MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) digital video delivery solutions, including the Electra 7000 encoder, ProStream(tm) 1000 stream processing platform with DiviTrackIP(tm) statistical multiplexing, and NMX Digital Service Manager(tm).

With the deployment of the Electra 8000 compression platform, SKY Brasil has gained additional bandwidth efficiency and expanded its HD services. Harmonic’s Electra 8000 AVC encoder supports SD and HD, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC, as well as integrated statistical multiplexing, broadcast quality up/down-conversion and other unique features such as Jünger Level Magic(tm) automatic audio leveling adjustment. Electra 8000’s groundbreaking architecture provides SKY Brasil with a state-of-the-art, simultaneous dual-output (HD/SD) encoder in a single rack unit, which facilitates the launch of new value-added video services.