Traditionally, broadcasting video meant owning a licensed station or paying one to carry your content. However, the Internet has made it possible for anyone with a video camera or a smartphone to upload their content and make it available for the world to see. Harmonic (News - Alert) provides video delivery infrastructure for video services and emerging television organizations. Its production ready solutions give service providers the tools they need to deliver broadcast quality material for new media video platforms and television. To meet the growing demand of digital content, the company announced the launch of ProMedia Carbon MP, a cloud-based transcoding service for professional applications.

Transcoding video content allows service providers to convert broadcast quality video content to the most popular media formats so they can be accessed through different devices and operating systems without compatibility issues. The new platform will be available on the Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) marketplace.

ProMedia Carbon MP is powered by the Rhozet technology from Harmonic and it gives the user the ability to transcode file-based video content in the cloud. The application’s transcoding engine can be accessed through XML API for scalable workflows with cloud-based transcoding deployments.

"Whether our customers utilize ProMedia Carbon MP to meet ad-hoc transcoding needs or as a platform for hosting a cloud-based transcoding farm, they'll be able to greatly improve their transcoding workflow and minimize costs through a pay-as-you-go business model," said Yoav Derazon, director of product management for cloud services and transcoding, Harmonic.

The platform allows for a number of video modification operations previously available to professionals. The user interface and API provides some critical functions to adjust video quality to professional standards such as color correction, logo insertion, SD/HD and PAL/NTSC conversions and multi-format closed-captioning processing. It supports a large selection of acquisition, broadcast, nonlinear editing and mobile formats such as CableLabs (News - Alert), MP4, QuickTime, MXF and XDCAM HD.

The user interface is designed to give the user control over the transcoding process so files can be converted into the desired format. Harmonic says the ProMedia Carbon MP service will benefit, “media professionals with low-volume transcoding needs, content owners and service providers who require assistance managing occasional spikes in load on their transcoding workflows, and service providers looking to deploy flexible, cloud-based transcoding farms.”