[SatNews] Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) has announced Harmonic VOS, a powerful, extensible software platform and architecture designed to shape the future of video production and delivery.

VOS will enable completely virtualized media processing from a single software platform, encompassing historically discreet functions from ingest to playout, graphics, branding, compression, packaging, and delivery for broadcast and multiscreen applications. Harmonic offered the first public demonstrations of VOS at booth SU1210 during the recent 2014 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

VOS has the potential to fundamentally change the video delivery ecosystem by bringing all media processing functions into one simplified, unified platform and workflow for increased operational flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. Operating virtually in IT data center environments, VOS can scale up or down to accommodate peaks in demand based on capacity and functional requirements across all video services.

Patrick Harshman, president and CEO of Harmonic, said, "Video content providers and service providers want greater flexibility, speed, and the ability to leverage the cost-effective scale of IT environments. With VOS, our customers will be able to create and distribute new video content globally in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the resources that it takes today, with better video quality, while leveraging public and private clouds."

VOS includes Harmonic's PURE Compression Engine, providing ground-breaking video quality and bandwidth efficiency for SD, HD, and Ultra HD formats; MPEG-2, MPEG-4/AVC, and HEVC compression over CBR; VBR, and ABR streams.

Harmonic also announced Electra XVM at this show, the first product to be delivered based on VOS. Electra XVM is an integrated package of VOS functionality, including the PURE Compression Engine, playout, advanced graphics, packaging, and delivery, and operates in data center environments on OpenStack or VMware vSphere environments for maximum operational flexibility. Virtual machine instances of Electra XVM can leverage data center capacity on demand according to the mix of codecs and formats used, from MPEG-2 SD to HEVC Ultra HD.

Electra XVM is available immediately in a variety of purchase and usage licensing models according to customer requirements. Further information about Harmonic and the company's products is available at http://www.harmonicinc.com/.