Harris Broadens Product Scope at NAB

Harris recently completed the first 100 days of its integration of Leitch. For attendees at this year’s NAB show in April that means a visit to the Harris booth, which used to be strictly transmission and automation gear, will now mean seeing products that touch virtually every aspect of a facility’s operations.

Among the new offerings will be new versions of Leitch Velocity editing software and Leitch Nexio server platforms. Velocity NX is designed to help edit station promos in both HD and SD while Velocity XNG will give users an SD/HD news editing package.

“We’ll be showing them working with Sony’s Varicam system and a software-only version of the products will also be unveiled,” says Stan Moot, Harris Broadcast VP, corporate development.

Content management will also be a big part of the Harris plans, especially given Harris’ earlier acquisition of traffic and automation giant Encoda Systems. That acquisition led to the development of “H-Class,” a traffic, billing and automation system that will let broadcasters add on “modules” to help with HD ad insertion, digital multicasting, and other new business opportunities.

Harris will also look to integrate the Leitch Icon line, a full suite of SD/HD master control and branding products, into H-Class. Based on the Leitch NEO modular platform, it combines master control functions with multi-layer integrated branding and is the only master control that can be combined with other advanced applications.

Moot says it is the first branding solution to combine logo insertion with multiple real-time data-fed crawls and a squeezeback DVE for maximum channel branding impact. It’s also useful for channel branding applications such as time/temperature, still/animations, audio clip playback and text crawls for breaking news.

One of the big themes this year at the show will be signal conversion as all stations look to integrate HD and SD material for either on-air promos, commercials or newscasts.Harris will look to meet those demands with the X75 multiple-path converter/synchronizer. It includes a hardware plug-in module for MPEG4 streaming for monitoring purposes, a video-to-audio timing measurement tool to help maintain lip sync through multiple conversions, Dolby E encoder and a 32-channel audio module with eight AES I/O.

The product, says Moot, typifies the Harris approach to integration. “Our products are no longer a bunch of pieces plugging in together,” says Moot. “We’re one unit with an overall workflow and single set of business rules [thanks to our H-Class traffic and billing platform.”