Imagine and Harmonic help Jordan Media City transition from SD to HD

Imagine Communications has secured the contract to transition the playout facilities at Jordan Media City (JMC) in Amman, Jordan, from SD to HD. The first phase of the expansion will allow JMC to add six new ART HD channels to support its growing roster of international clients.

JMC has also chosen an end-to-end headend solution from Harmonic to support its direct-to-home (DTH) satellite service. JMC is using Harmonic’s ProView integrated receiver decoders (IRDs), Electra X2 advanced media processors, ProStream 9100 with ACE stream processors and transcoders and NMX Digital Service Manager to manage its entire DTH workflow, from channel acquisition to reception, descrambling, encoding, transcoding, multiplexing and scrambling.

JMC was established 15 years ago as the first private media city in the Middle East, providing state-of-the-art technology and experienced staff for regional and international clients. Today, more than 400 channels are broadcast from the facility, which links directly to Arabsat, Nilesat, Yahsat and AsiaSat satellite platforms covering the different regions. The expansion will help JMC to answer increasing demand for HD-quality programming in the region.

At the heart of the JMC installation will be Imagine Communications’ Nexio servers. The Nexio AMP, a UHD-ready platform, delivers format transparency while providing HD-SDI ingest, preview and playout. Nexio Farad centralised online storage will enable true shared access for fast on-SAN editing for Apple Final Cut Pro® editors. The Farad storage network’s intrinsic mirroring functionality provides resiliency, ensuring high availability of the platform.

Along with the new storage network, Imagine Communications is supplying its Platinum VX digital video router, as well as its monitoring, conversion, synchronisation and test and measurement solutions. The JMC system will also incorporate Imagine Communications’ Nexio IconLogo high-definition channel branding system to provide downstream branding for the new channels. The Imagine Communications solution is easily scalable and designed to accommodate additional expansion in the future.