Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark LLC (hereinafter “COMARK”), a manufacturer and supplier of DTV transmitters, encoding systems, and associated field services for more than 45 years, has announced that WSBE Rhode Island PBS has upgraded its ATSC encoding system with an OTT origin server solution from Comark Digital Services (CDS).
In 2019, CDS delivered a new software-based ATSC encoding system that delivers the highest possible video quality to WSBE’s OTA viewers. This software-based encoding solution is extremely flexible, capable of providing simultaneous MPEG-2, H.264, HEVC, as well as HLS output formats. The HLS output format is used for streaming OTT services.
Recently, WSBE added an origin server from CDS for their OTT streaming requirements of their main HD program to a CDN. The origin server plays a key role in OTT as it holds a video collection, temporarily storing this content on the disk and responds to requests from the CDNs. CDS provided factory integration, configuration, and test of the origin server in the Southwick, MA lab facility. The server was then shipped to the station for installation and final configuration / commissioning.
The Origin Packer provided by Hitachi/Comark is an addressable, just-in time packager that encrypts the video content in most popular ABR formats. Utilizing its cache mechanism, the Origin Packager reduces encoding and storage requirements and provides high throughput to deliver content to any CDN.
“WSBE Engineering gives the highest rating to the Hitachi-Comark Sales Team and Technical Staff” States Richard Dunn, Rhode Island PBS Director of Engineering. “Their planning and support resulted in a smooth, hassle free, integration.”
“We have positioned CDS to integrate cutting edge DTV encoding solutions that support both ATSC 1.0 today as well as ATSC 3.0 tomorrow,” states Joe Turbolski, VP of Sales and Marketing of COMARK. “Our team worked closely with the staff at WSBE on many aspects of their encoding needs and we are tremendously pleased to be part of this essential project.”
