Harmonic takes aim at telcos
Harmonic, a video infrastructure equipment provider that cut its teeth in the cable industry, will chow down on telcos this year, an executive made clear during a presentation at the 10th Annual Needham Growth Conference in New York City.
“One of the most important drivers for Harmonic over the last few years has been the emergence of telcos as players in the video business,” Robin Dickson, Harmonic’s CFO said during the presentation. “While this is still in the very early stages, telco video mostly delivered over IPTV is a significant new growth opportunity and market for us.”
Harmonic partners with traditional telco equipment suppliers like Alcatel-Lucent but has traditionally split its efforts between cable and satellite video TV providers by delivering video-on-demand, high definition and other forms of time- shifted television technology.
“It’s not just about cable and satellite anymore, but it’s increasingly the role of the telcos and the over-the-top Internet providers as well,” said Dickson. “The least well understood at this point is the whole business of Internet video but it’s very clear that the service provider model is under threat from Internet providers and we expect to see significant growth opportunities in that business as well as mobile.”
Dickson called encoding Harmonic’s “key competency” and said the company would continue to drive business off a product line that handles both traditional MPEG-2 and emerging MPEG-4 compression formats.
“We do encoding for standard definition, encoding for high definition and we sell these encoders to service providers of all stripes all over the world,” he said.
More recently, the company has also expanded into gear that helps service providers condition content for on-demand playout as another part of its encoding expertise.
“As operators are managing more types and volume of video content and at the same time managing more subscribers who are using VoD, the ability to store and organize these assets and distribute them intelligently over a network is becoming absolutely mission critical,” Dickson said.
This expertise, he said, along with expanding capabilities brought onboard when Harmonic acquired Entone and Rhozet, present the company with an opportunity to continue its strong growth with traditional customers and expand to new ones, he said.
“Cable and satellite still represent the vast majority of our revenue (but) we certainly see growing opportunities in the telco space,” he said.