Harmonic, which offers solutions for delivering live and on-demand video to TVs, PCs and mobile devices, today announced that Chinese cable provider Hunan Cable Group has launched a new HDTV service and expanded its on-demand offering, powered by Harmonic’s (News - Alert) digital video delivery solutions.

With this announcement Hunan Cable has become the first provincial-level cable network in China to provide HDTV services. The company has deployed Ion AVC HD multi-channel encoders, ProStream 1000 stream processing platform with DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing, NSG 9000 universal edgeQAMs, and NMX Digital Service Manager.

Company officials say that this deployment provides Hunan Cable Group with a fully integrated IP headend, encompassing compression, statistical multiplexing, scrambling, VOD edge processing and network management.

Hunan Cable serves more than five million subscribers in the Hunan Province.

“Performance and reliability were key criteria in selecting the technology for our new HDTV and on-demand systems,” said Li Tu, director of the Technical Center at Hunan Cable Group, in a statement. “Harmonic’s digital video solutions met and exceeded these requirements.”

The new system, according to Tu, provides them with a powerful, high-quality infrastructure to offer a very compelling TV experience to their customers.

The compact, power-efficient MPEG-4 AVC, or “H.264,” HD encoders from Harmonic deliver up to four channels within a single 1-RU chassis, lowering operating expenditures while enhancing video quality, company officials said. The modular 1-RU ProStream 1000 stream processing platform handles MPEG-2 re-encoding, multiplexing, scrambling, and advanced processing of the MPEG streams.
Harmonic’s NSG 9000 universal edgeQAM platform provides reliable edge processing for the VOD services, while supporting expanded high-speed data services, the company said. NMX Digital Service Manager offers Hunan Cable Group a powerful set of tools for network configuration, management and automated redundancy.

Raymond Tse, vice president of Asia Pacific Sales at Harmonic, says that the new HDTV service rollout by Hunan Cable indicates the growing popularity of HDTV in China.

“Hunan Cable Group is also a customer of Harmonic’s HFC access technologies, and with this project, Harmonic is providing them with the latest generation H.264 and VOD technologies as part of comprehensive, integrated video delivery network architecture,” Tse added.

Back in February Harmonic announced that its Rhozet Carbon Coder universal media transcoding software was selected by NBC to prepare VOD content during the network’s coverage of the XXI Olympic Winter Games from Vancouver.

Harmonic is displaying its digital video and HFC access solutions at the CCBN 2010 Expo taking place March 23-25 in Beijing.