Earnings Labs

Harmonic Inc. (HLIT)

Q1 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 22, 2014

$11.48

+11.19%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
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Transcript

Unidentified Analyst

Management

All right, let’s just move on now. So we have Peter Alexander, he is the Chief Marketing Officer at Harmonic and therefore we go back to the headend and get a little bit more about that from Peter and of course Harmonic is a lot beyond that as well. So, with that Peter on to you.

Peter Alexander

Management

All right, thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for the introduction. My name is Peter Alexander, I’m Chief Marketing Officer at Harmonic. And I have been with the company about 18 months and excited about being here. And hope to share with you kind of where we fit in the whole video ecosystem that in relation to the cable business. And hopefully leave enough time for questions at the end, that’s certainly my intention. I will start by saying we are in a quiet period for Q4. So there are some things obviously that can answer questions on. And nothing yet that I will say it should be considered to be reflection on what happened in Q4. And so with that I’ll get to it. So who is Harmonic? What does the company do? Well off course, I am the marketing guy. So I’m going to start by saying, we enable amazing video experiences. But really if you look at where we fit in the ecosystem, which I’ll go into, I very much believe that to be to true. And as we see everyone start to talk about ultra high definition and those kinds of things. Nothing will guarantee, you don’t have a good experience more than having poor video encoding, having poor transmission and so on. And so we do believe we are a big part of what’s going to make future experience in video, what it will be and there will be a big part of that. Just to give you some perspective on our business and show you where we are and why we are relevant to cable and how that looks. You can see from this chart that we are about 55% to 60% international with the remainder being domestic. In terms of our products 47%…

Unidentified Analyst

Management

So the way you described the CCAP approach that you guys are taking, I mean it looks like it’s more a higher density approach rather than an all IP approach. I mean if this is where that cable guys are hiding you towards, or is this an interim spare band [ph]?

Peter Alexander

Management

So first of all it essentially isn’t all IP approach. In that – the interface – of the interfaces into the box are 10-gigabit Ethernet. But this is certainly the way in close conversations with our cable customers – they versus to architect the device. I think there is interest in the flexibility on the routing side that that our version of the architecture provide and a simplicity of the network architecture that they are very attractive to. So we believe that we built something is very much along the lines of what the operators are looking for. Please.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Can you talk about the fact that there is a 4K content [indiscernible] and can you comment on when you think, between the encoding and the quality of encoding, the size of the TV, when does the user say, hey, I can really tell the difference between native 4K and 1080p upscale, is that a 60-inch TV with the encoder set?

Peter Alexander

Management

Yes, so something they get trained on, but the bigger the TV gets the easier is to tell that. I think if you compare 1080p television with a Ultra HD or 4K television, it doesn’t take much to be able to tell right now, even down to 55-inch. Now, that some people will say baloney, that’s fair enough, try this – the closer you stand to it, the more you can tell. And if you look even on Sony’s own website, they talk about how the typical viewing distance that you expect from a television is reduced in an ultra high-def environment, meaning more of a home cinematic experience broader field of view. If you watch a 1080p television and it’s a 60-inch and you are just a few feet from it, you can the pixelation very much, that’s a lot less pronounced in an ultra high def environment. But the 1080p content does look good, the video experts and I walk around them all day would tell you it depends on the content, if you are watching high speed sports, a lot of changes, things like waterfalls and where there is a lot of, you are challenging the encoding and so on. If it’s encoded well, even then, you will still notice the differences pretty quickly. So but I would say from 60 on, there is a pronounced difference and it’s all about how far you are from itself. There I saw an interesting video report and where they were saying, we can’t tell the difference, but they were watching 1080p on an ultra, and ultra on an ultra, try watching 1080p on a 1080p and ultra on a ultra next to it, you will immediately see the difference. While we are thinking, I can add that, we have a ultra high def and 4K test clips on our website and we do sublicense content to other vendors for using in testing demonstration examples and with assuming [indiscernible], legal agreement, yes thank you.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Yeah, I just wanted to ask you very quickly on your analogy that we need a Pandora for video, actually we have video apps, some what we have YouTube, does exactly what it does, it forces you to do with ultra [indiscernible] next video for the YouTube apps on TVs. Apart from Google that I have so much knowledge on their customers and also huge database of videos, who do you expect will be bringing these kind of services to market?

Peter Alexander

Management

Well, anyone with a content library, I think, so there is a lot. One of the challengers for lot of broadcasters and media companies and for the one of the drivers behind multi-screen has been the ability to access libraries of content, because if you are many media companies you have a few channels that playout 24 hours a day, but they are touching the only the very thin veneer of their content library and so access to a content library in a more automated way would make sense. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see major media companies start to offer these kinds of personalized channel services, is that makes sense. And then of course that could be new media aggregators doing that to. Any questions?

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Thanks for the time. Thanks.

Peter Alexander

Management

Great, thank you for the invitation, it’s good to see everyone. Thank you.