NASA UHD Channel Launches November 1
If you’ve always wanted to travel to space, but don’t have the resources of Elon Musk or Richard Branson, the new NASA Ultra HD channel may be the next best thing.
NASA and Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT) have announced a new UHD channel that will include video and high-resolution imagery from current and former space missions, as well as rocket launch footage and video feeds of training and development sessions. When the channel laaunches on November 1, it will be the first consumer UHD channel in North America.
According to Harmonic CMO Peter Alexander, NASA knew that it had the potential to compress its existing NASA TV channel in order to free up more bandwidth. Harmonic was able to do that compression efficiently enough to leave room for a whole new Ultra HD channel, which will stream at a bit rate of about 13 Mbit/s. Production and distribution of the live, linear channel are also powered by several Harmonic technologies, including the: Ellipse 3000 contribution encoder, ProView 7100 integrated receiver-decoder (IRD), MediaGrid shared storage system, Polaris playout management suite, Spectrum X advanced media server system, Electra X3 advanced media processor, ProMedia Origin packager and streaming video server, and NSG Exo distributed CCAP system. (See Harmonic, Intelsat Unveil UHD Test Channel.)