Harmonic Inc. (HLIT)
NASDAQ: HLIT · Real-Time Price · USD
10.56
+0.13 (1.25%)
Apr 24, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
← View all transcripts

Analyst Day 2024

Jun 13, 2024

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Appreciate you joining us today. With me are Nimrod Ben-Natan, Harmonic's President and CEO, Asaf Matatyaou, SVP Broadband Products, Dan Gledhill, SVP Broadband Fiber, and Gil Rudge, SVP Video Products and Solutions. Before we begin, I'd like to review our agenda for today. First, we'll have Nimrod kick off our session with a brief introduction, a review of our overall strategy and where we see the opportunities ahead of us. Then we will have Asaf and Dan do a deeper dive into our broadband segment where they will discuss current market trends, our exciting growth strategy and differentiated technology in this segment. Following this, I will provide our long term target financial model for broadband. Gil will then walk you through our video segment where he will discuss our strategy which is focused on continued growth in SaaS and is designed to address current market conditions.

I'll finish up the presentation by providing our long term target financial model for video and then we'll open it up for your questions. Before we continue, I must mention that today's presentation will include projections and other forward looking statements about our business and financial performance. Actual results may differ materially from our current expectations and I refer you to our most recent forms 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K as filed with the SEC. For more information on risk factors, please review the cautionary language here on the slide. Note that unless otherwise indicated, the financial metrics we provide you on this call have been determined on a non-GAAP basis. I know many of you with us today are already very familiar with Harmonic, but for anyone new joining us, the slide presented here provides a few key points related to our company.

As you can see, we operate through two distinct business segments, Broadband and Video. Today we will present those separately in order to provide you with more insights into each of these segments. We will talk about what we have already accomplished and perhaps more importantly, our forward plans and expectations for these businesses. With that, I would now like to turn it over to Nimrod to kick off today's event.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Thank you, Walter, and thank you all for joining us today. Well, it's my third day on the job, but my journey with Harmonic is a bit longer. I've been leading the Harmonic broadband business since 2012 and led the organic growth into broadband market and pioneering the virtual vCMTS and distributed access architecture. Prior to that, I've been leading the product and strategy for Harmonic products. So I'm very familiar with our video business, technology and customers. I am excited about the growth opportunity both in broadband and video streaming and today we will share with you more details on our technology differentiation, market opportunity and projections. I truly believe in solving challenging problems which create value to our customers. Typically this requires disruption of technology or architecture and out innovating. I also believe in being nimble and focused on execution.

Also want to share with you today a couple of organizational updates as I step into the new role. Thanks Walter for agreeing to take on additional responsibility. In addition to being our Chief Financial Officer, Walter will take responsibility for our operation, IT and cybersecurity. In addition, we're conducting a search for a new General Manager for our video business. Combined, this will greatly help me to stay focused on customers, products, strategy and investors. I will start with a brief overview of the current state of broadband, highlighting the significant development and challenges in the industry. We'll start with the recent emerging Internet traffic trends. Then we'll examine the competitive landscape for service providers and how these providers are evolving their networks to stay ahead in the race to meet growing traffic demands. Lastly, I will review the addressable market which supports our growth expectations.

While we no longer see the same 30%-40% annual increase we've seen during COVID, we do see more like 15% both in the downstream and upstream. We know upstream is more challenging for cable operators. At the same time, we see an interesting impact of special events such as live sports that are causing significant spikes in bandwidth demand. A good example for that was the NFL playoff game which was exclusive on Peacock late last year, which by the way was based on Harmonic technology. The game had peak concurrency of more than 16 million users, which created an increase of about 30% of peak Internet usage for many of our North American customers. Another interesting example is what happens during the first day of a new game release where all gamers are trying to download at the same time the new game and start playing.

The upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which is coming in October, is expected to be 300 GB file and you can expect how long it's going to take to download it if you don't have a really fast internet service. We now see intensified competition for cable both with fixed wireless and fiber. With limited cable subscriber growth or even modest loss of subscribers. We're also seeing cable getting very creative at bundling services on top of their broadband service, specifically with mobile and more recently the way they rebundle streaming video services. Given the competitive landscape, cable operators must evolve their network to keep up with customer demand both on upstream and downstream, as well as take advantage of network modernization which will help reduce power, space and operating cost while improving the service reliability.

As we know, majority of cable networks are still running on the so-called lower split, which is limiting their upstream speed they can offer with analog optics and aging CMTS platforms. Fiber is clearly the desired end game, but very capital intensive to upgrade and takes many years to execute. The good news is that there are multiple network upgrade options for cable operators to consider with DOCSIS 3.1 or Boosted, which can help them leverage the full potential of the DOCSIS 3.1 and achieving fiber speeds. Or with DOCSIS 4.0 for those who would like to achieve a more symmetric multi-gigabit service, which by the way can enable even higher speeds than 10 gig PON fiber, and you will see this in action shortly.

Of course, fiber optionality for fiber islands, fiber on demand, precision PON edging out away from the network or greenfields, and of course the BEAD program. We're also seeing interesting opportunities with Edge Compute, which can run at the very edge of the network, milliseconds away from subscribers by leveraging the compute infrastructure that is being deployed as part of the network modernization. Our recent announcement of the new Beacon Speed Maximizer is taking advantage of this capability. In summary, status quo is really not an option given the competition and state of the network. The best path forward is by modernizing the network with virtual broadband platform and distributed access architecture. As we look at the addressable market, we see two major components, DOCSIS and fiber.

In DOCSIS, we see migration away from the legacy CCAP into the more modern virtual CMTS and DAA architecture, which will grow in the next couple of years as more and more customers are expanding into the 3.1 capabilities or DOCSIS 4.0. On the fiber, we see two key components: cable operators going to fiber whether it's the edge out or fiber islands, as we discuss, and then we'll expand on that. We're also seeing an opportunity in the telco tier two and three combined. The fiber market that we're looking at is only 30% of the total addressable market of fiber. So this is really the portion of the market that we are going after.

When you combine both the DOCSIS and the fiber together, we see about $2.5 billion market we're going after by 2027, and the cloud services that you see is what represents our value add capabilities to enrich subscribers, quality of experience and reduce operating cost. The beacon that I mentioned earlier is part of that. After three years of leading the category of virtual CMTS and Distributed Access architecture, last year in 2023 for the first time we were recognized by Dell'Oro as the market share leader for the entire cable broadband category. While we lead the market, this is still only a milestone and we see significant growth ahead across all metrics of connected devices, number of modems and new customers as we look at our strategy. The foundation is the install base and momentum that we have in the market today leading into our market share position.

We expect those customers to expand and we expect to diversify with new customers that we're going to win. And on top of that we plan on layering on fiber capabilities by enabling commercially effective transition to fiber, focusing on cloud services to enrich subscriber's quality of experience and explore edge compute applications and on top of that, diversify into the fiber telco market, the tier two and threes where we believe we can differentiate with our new fiber products which Dan will expand. Before I turn it over to Asaf, Dan and Gil to expand on our broadband and video business segments, I'd like to share a short video of about two minutes highlighting recent exciting and unique product announcement and presentations we made both in broadband and video. Let's play the video.

Hope you enjoyed it. Now I will turn it over to Asaf.

Asaf Matatyaou
SVP Broadband Products, Harmonic

Thanks Nimrod. I love those videos. They showcase how we bring the vision of the future that Nimrod just spoke about into reality and how Harmonic continues to push the industry forward. We have a tradition that we bring first in industry products to trade shows. I was recently on the floor just last month in ANGA COM in Cologne, Germany. We were incredibly busy with people spilling out of the booth and customers were excited about the three products that we just announced. Customers love being hands on for things they've never experienced before. Let me highlight a few points in these products. With the Pearl we showed the highest density remote OLT that supports both XGS and GPON. Next with the Beacon Intelligent Speed Maximizer, folks at the booth saw four times the speeds to a subscriber. Now they can squeeze every bit out of an impaired plant.

It was a real highlight of the show with many wow responses that this is game changing for them, saving them truck rolls and labor. Lastly with unified 4.0 they saw firsthand the record setting speeds that CableLabs blogged about. That's 9.4 gigs to a single subscriber. One operator even looked at the back of the cable modem asking where's the fiber? Whether you've got a plan for DOCSIS fiber or both, we've got you covered. We're way ahead and continue pushing forward to keep our high share with current and future customers. Now it's not debatable that broadband is essential. It's considered a utility. We expect that it's always working and then it continues to grow and change with faster speeds and newer applications. Let's review the key values to winning in broadband. We already covered the first two points that are table stakes.

High speed and reliability operators also need solutions that grow and expand with subscribers' needs and they want to depend on suppliers that have the reputation and track record to deliver products and services for mission-critical broadband. Environmental impact and the recurring OpEx needs to be sustainable. Can't grow at the same rate as the speeds that they offer. Lastly, the future is dynamic and being future-ready to adapt quickly keeps them competitive. I was talking to an analyst recently and he asked who would risk their broadband business if you don't have all these ingredients? Their broadband service is way too important to risk. Our proven track record and our rich feature set put us in that essential position. Now let's look at our products and services that are the winning combination in broadband.

The concentric circles represent our cOS core solution with our platform as the foundation. The applications running on the platform around that foundation and our central cloud services enhance the experience and increase subscriber satisfaction. Our cOS core connects to an extensive set of devices that enable Harmonic's ability to expand and diversify to other market segments which Nimrod recently discussed. Now let's focus on our platform first. It's the foundation that we've invested in for more than a decade. The value to our customers starts with the optionality supporting both DOCSIS and fiber broadband simultaneously connecting to any device in any location. So whether an operator starts with DOCSIS and grows with fiber services or wants to start deploying only fiber today, the solution adapts to any shifts in broadband infrastructure.

The infrastructure real estate that cOS runs on is incredibly valuable to operators with compute being as close to the subscriber as possible, enhancing their subscriber service experience. The value to Harmonic is a compute footprint that can expand with revenue generating opportunities for edge compute applications. The platform also feeds real time and high volume data to feed our cloud services advanced analytics. The cOS platform is future ready for value added applications such as service chaining which can drive even more license revenue going forward. In summary, it's the foundation for expanding into new verticals that grow our tam. One proof point is our recent Charter announcement that they are deploying Harmonic's platform in a distributed access architecture, creating a flexible and sustainable foundation for market leading connectivity services. We will now focus on our applications.

It's important that we delight our customers with our growing set of applications so they can continue coming back for more. We started our journey with a virtual CMTS with its first deployments in 2016. Now, with the market share leading CMTS in the entire industry, we expanded our broadband reach with fiber applications including Virtual OLT and Virtual BNG. Leveraging our edge compute, we enrich subscriber services and increase subscriber satisfaction. The Beacon Intelligent Speed Maximizer adapts to plant conditions. Delivering the fastest speeds to each subscriber and L4S reduces lag and packet loss. In simple terms, happier subscribers reduce subscriber churn. Another way to think of this another way to keep subscribers happy is having the software resiliency needed to increase service uptime. While the software we deliver is easy to install and upgrade as well as our software Velocity keeps pace with operator needs.

The software itself was built with our expertise and technology we pioneered for years. The value to the business is that it's sticky, customers love it and it's difficult to replace. An example of our applications in action is with Comcast where they use our virtual BNG and remote OLT technology connected to the virtual CMTS delivering multi gig symmetrical regardless of the type of wire connecting their customers. Now we turn our focus to enhancing the operator experience and subscriber satisfaction with our subscription based cloud services. The real time and high volume data that we spoke of earlier feed into network and service insights driving proactive resolution and intelligent AI based recommendations. The deployment and operation automation reduces manual intervention to deploy rapidly, reducing human error with simplified maintenance.

The same data driving Insights also drives our monitoring service which is a single pane of glass for all applications combining DOCSIS and fiber services for unified and simplified operations. Our customers enjoy increased subscriber satisfaction. Reducing churn while reducing OpEx subscription and cloud services is one of the segments that create revenue growth and we are best positioned to leverage our platform and applications. Feedback from our customers include Charter's CTO who said the platform provides real time analytics and insights for proactive network intelligence to ensure an outstanding broadband experience for their subscribers. Finally, let's look at the devices that connect the platform, the applications and cloud services to the actual subscribers. The value to our business is the expansion and diversification of the market segments across an expansive set of broadband footprints.

Optionality is a theme for us and our devices fit in any location, indoor or outdoor, as well as delivering fiber and DOCSIS services. Each has amazing performance and the lowest power consumption, whether it's unified 4.0 devices or our nodes or our shelves and modules that support any PON technology. We are also proud of our broad patent portfolio with our devices. We want to highlight the over 40 patents that deliver reduced power consumption as well as notifying and reducing network power interruptions with VBIAs buoy and Dying Gasp technologies. The value to our business is that our device portfolio is unique and market share leading in what would otherwise be a commodity market. An example of the versatility of our devices is with Claro Peru where they combine their past vCMTS deployments with Reef and Ripple together with the Fin to deliver both DOCSIS and fiber services.

Now let's summarize why we win with our transformative software that brings the future. Today cOS is market share leading and is the only mature and field-proven solution that delivers symmetric multi-gigabit broadband in an environmentally sustainable way that is future-ready. Coupled with our broad portfolio of devices, our business opportunities will continue to expand and diversify. We'd also like to shine a spotlight on the importance of and positive environmental impact enabled by our cOS solution. Vodafone and Comcast have separately published energy savings driven by virtualized cloud-based technologies and network evolution that paved the way forward. For example, Comcast is reporting that it has reduced electricity to deliver each byte of data across its entire network by 40% since 2019. If we look at Harmonic's platform when compared with legacy products, we save our customers an enormous amount of space.

That means they don't need to build new buildings or in fact they reduce their facility needs while increasing their speeds. It also translates into significant recurring electricity savings. This is another example of how we win and how we push the industry forward by leveraging modern and sustainable technologies. This brings us to our concluding slides that lists the numerous ways that cOS is a growth engine into the future, delivering the modern broadband infrastructure that has been held back for over two decades by legacy equipment that served our industry well, yet it's holding it back. At this transformative moment, let us focus on a few highlights to distinguish between legacy and modern solutions. As we've shown today, the Harmonic cOS solution checks all the boxes that we listed earlier as the key values to winning in broadband.

The future is today with cOS and only gets brighter as we look ahead. With that I'd like to hand it over to Dan who's going to focus on our broadband fiber business.

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

Thanks, Asaf. I'm lucky enough to spend most of my time talking to Harmonic customers and prospect accounts about how we can solve their most challenging problems. I'd like to share with you today their feedback and why they select and trust Harmonic with their broadband solution. We'll frame the conversation by covering the markets we serve, talk about the unique value that we provide to our customers, and walk through the most common use case for our solution and technology. By the end, I hope to explain and illustrate how Harmonic is fundamentally changing the way operators can design, construct, deploy and operate their broadband ecosystems to fundamentally change the underlying economics of fiber to the home. Talking about the markets we serve, we start with cable operators. Today Harmonic has over 185,000 RPDs deployed for DOCSIS.

Each of these locations can coexist with a remote OLT, the infrastructure component that powers fiber to the home. In fact, each RPD can represent an opportunity for colocation of many remote OLTs. Looking at the telco side of the market, we see an opportunity bringing a distributed access architecture to agile tier two and tier three telcos who look to expand their network and can leverage and quickly deploy our unique innovative solution. Collectively, these represent a fantastic near- and long-term revenue opportunity for us. Near-term revenue will be driven by cable companies who are modernizing their networks and taking each of those 185,000 RPDs to fiber. With the addition of our remote OLTs, telcos will ramp much like distributed access did for cable when we initially introduced the cOS solution. Now let's talk about why operators select Harmonic. The story starts with open ONU in fiber.

The ONU is the device that is located in the customer's home. It's frequently known as an ONU optical network unit or ONT. These have traditionally been required components of OLT vendors' ecosystems. They were vendor locked. Harmonic changes that paradigm. We allow operators to select best-in-class third-party ONUs and ONTs that work with our network infrastructure. Breaking the restrictions has disrupted traditional OLT vendors and allowed a new negotiation leverage for operators seeking to manage their costs. We are reducing and changing the way traditional OLT vendors have over-earned in this segment. Our cOS solution also simplifies and streamlines the way an operator views next-generation fiber technologies. There are a number of standards for fiber to the home. Utilizing the cOS umbrella.

We simplify that by providing a single pane of glass for provisioning, management and operation of fiber to the home, regardless of what standard may be utilized, the underlying technology. For operators who have existing networks of multiple technologies, it simplifies their day-to-day business and for operators who are unsure or uncertain of the next generation technology. They can have confidence that whatever the future holds, they'll get access to those devices utilizing their existing cOS core. Lastly, we talk about providing a solution that's flexible for any network topology. Think about distributed access and what we've done for the cable space. We are allowing operators to deploy shelves, nodes and low density OLT pluggables from a single virtualized core with streamlined operations for all of the devices under one pane of glass. Let's talk about how an operator can utilize these technologies in practice.

The solution that we're about to walk through goes by many names in the industry. Fiber, Optionality, Precision, PON, Fiber On Demand, Fiber island, or more creatively, one operator has named this the Unicorn Node. It's great to see operators taking our solution and adopting it as their own. The story starts with our virtual core serving both DOCSIS and PON. We talk about the way that it provides an operator the flexibility and leverage to manage their existing infrastructure manage their existing buildings, switches, racks as efficiently as possible. Those buildings and infrastructures are connected to an outside plant, reflected in this diagram by the Ripple Node provided by Harmonic. That Ripple node for DOCSIS providers serves residential and business customers generally within 2 km of the node. This is the nature of DOCSIS.

The node must be relatively close to the end subscriber thanks to the Ripple node supporting the addition of 10-gig PON. Through module additions like our recently announced Pearl, we can take that existing node location and expand the service area that the operator can reach. Now, with Pearl, operators can deliver fiber to the home broadband at a radius of up to 60 km from each Ripple node. Think about what that means in terms of building a network, efficiently monetizing and utilizing existing locations to extend your reach and serve previously hard to get to areas. Note that we've not disrupted the DOCSIS service. The DOCSIS service is sustained and still operating from this Ripple node. The OLT module has been located in the second slot so that operators can do both simultaneously. Operators very frequently look to extend their network even further.

The Ripple node provides a unique capability to daisy chain nodes to get to hard to reach rural places without constructing a cabinet or point of presence on the ground. Thanks to our unique technology, we're able to not only serve the 60 km radius, but actually go even further. Think about what this means in the context of Harmonic having 185,000 RPDs deployed today. We think about a map with our existing node locations serving DOCSIS. Augmenting each of those existing RPDs with fiber gives us a coverage for new and existing customers unparalleled to anyone else in the industry. This nets a unique capability for our operators and partners to refine and rethink the way they operate their broadband networks.

We are very successful and grateful for our capability of expanding into global markets with large partners like Claro and Millicom who have utilized the technology I've described to efficiently and affordably deploy fiber to the home in new locations. Again, combining all of the capabilities of our technology, they're rethinking the way they design, manage and deploy their fiber to the home solutions. With that I would like to hand it off to Walter to review our financials.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Thank you Dan. Now I'd like to present our 2026 target financial model for broadband based on what Nimrod, Asaf and Dan have just outlined, including expected market growth, our strong leadership position, current customer wins, and our expectations of continued commercial success. We are targeting broadband revenue of $800 million in 2026 that reflects a 27% three-year compound annual growth rate and is well supported by both a top-down and bottom-up view of the market. As presented today. We expect this growth will be driven by accelerating DOCSIS network migrations and fiber expansion with both cable operators and telcos. Based on expanding to a broader base of customers and a higher mix of cOS our virtualized platform, we're targeting non-GAAP broadband gross margin of 49% for 2026, which would be an increase of 220 basis points from our 2023 actuals.

We're being cautious in projecting higher than 49% gross margins considering the level of new network migrations that may result in a higher mix of devices nodes early on. Based on this anticipated revenue growth and margin expansion coupled with significant operating leverage on our OpEx, we expect to achieve $224 million in adjusted EBITDA or 28% adjusted EBITDA margin in broadband for 2026. The three-year compound annual growth rate on the adjusted EBITDA is expected to be 47% reflecting the strong operating leverage in our model. Now I'd like to turn it over to Gil to present our video business.

Gil Rudge
SVP Video Products and Solutions, Harmonic

Thanks a lot, Walter. Let's dive into the discussion on the video business, and there's some good news here as we look forward. The question we'll be answering is why is Harmonic's strategy to elevate the video business looking at profitability together with growth opportunities? We have two engines driving that. The first engine is our appliance business. We've updated our strategy to focus on our most profitable products and our most profitable geographies, leading to increased EBITDA. The second engine is our cloud business that we expect will yield $100 million of recurring revenue by 2026. This business has two high-value growth opportunities. One with live sports streaming and the second with AdTech. For streaming and with the right size that we've performed, this is expected to provide sustained profitability. And that profitability is starting already in the second half of this year.

To set the stage, let's first take a look at the market dynamics and Harmonic's positioning at a 40,000-foot view. You can see we have two main segments in the video market. On the left side you can see the broadcast market. That includes the ABCs, FOX and NBC's of the world together with the pay TV operators like DirecTV, DISH, Comcast and Charter. On the right hand side we have the streaming market with subscription VOD like Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video. TV Everywhere is the streaming of live linear TV like Warner Bros. Discovery and again NBC and FOX. And then we have the pure live streaming including live sports streaming like Peacock and Apple. Each market has unique characteristics. In broadcast we have a unified signal that reaches all users. Every subscriber sees the same video at the same time.

Most of these channels are 24/7. There are also strict standards with zero tolerance to on-air issues, if you will, broadcast standards. The streaming market is different. Streams are unique per viewer, allowing for personalization and targeted ads. Viewing is on demand. The signals are only streamed when the user clicks to consume them. This market is constantly growing and evolving. When we look at the infrastructure for broadcast, it's primarily fixed hardware and software running in private facilities with a typical refresh cycle of five-seven years. In streaming, on the other hand, the infrastructure is highly dependent on the number of viewers accessing the service. So the infrastructure needs to be dynamic and that draws on the private and public cloud to take advantage of all the scalability and elasticity. Interestingly, technologies and boundaries between the two are starting to blur.

Broadcasters are moving to take advantage of the cloud. They're opting for hybrid workflows with some equipment on premise, some in the cloud. We're even seeing some primary workflows like channel origination moving 100% into the cloud. The reverse is also true. We're seeing streamers moving some part of their workflows on prem to save costs, but also looking to adopt the most strict broadcast standards in their streaming platforms. You cannot have a live event or sports or news and have it fail, the implications just too severe, especially if it's an exclusive event. This is where we get excited. This is where we have a unique position after we have years of expertise on the broadcast side and we're bringing that to the streaming world with the best video tech in the market.

So what is the total addressable market that we can address with our portfolio? We see the TAM in 2023 to be around $2 billion. The appliance business is mainly CapEx, driven by the number of channels sold. This segment has recurring SLA to support the products till the next refresh cycle of that install base. The market is mature with much more established competitors and the billions of dollars equipment of software and hardware out there that need ongoing support and services, which is also a nice part of our revenue. This segment is all about efficiency and cost reduction. They need to do more with less. Switching to the TAM on the cloud side, as you can see already in 2023, it's larger than the appliance TAM and this is where the growth opportunity exists. This business is OpEx driven.

It's based on usage as opposed to fixed costs and the massive growth in platforms and direct to consumer offerings. The viewers are embracing the streaming option more and more and the more viewers, the more usage and that yields more traffic, more ad inserted and of course more money generated. Switching to 2026, we can see the trend continuing with the cloud growing, but the overall TAM is remaining at that $2 billion mark. This is mainly driven by broadcast migration to the cloud and growing of the live streaming segment. The fact that Harmonic can address both sides of the piece, including hybrid workflows, is a reason for our excitement and it's key for the profitability and growth that we'll cover today. Now let's take a look at our first engine, the appliance business. Here we focused our investment to yield increased profitability.

As you've seen in the previous slide, the TAM for this segment is declining and naturally our projected revenue is declining too. However, the trick really here is profitability. Take our position in the market, our portfolio and track record and combine that with the right sizing of the business that's underway this year and that yields profitability, even with a decline in the revenue. So how do we get there and what is different from previous years? What have we changed? First of all, we're right sizing the business as we discussed. Secondly, we're focusing our engineering dollars on our core and most profitable product lines, together with focusing sales on the more profitable geographies. This is all backed by a strong brand and track record with the XOS and Spectrum product lines that are leading the industry.

With this, we expect to maintain our current market share while increasing profitability, and this is a key takeaway for our appliance business. The updated strategy will continue investment in our core products are used by the most renowned names in the media industry, as you can see in this slide. For XOS customers, we'll continue the function collapse of the most advanced media processor in the market. This allows for more cost savings for our customers by doing much more in one unit. We're also expanding the TAM we can reach by adding these new features for Spectrum, the industry's gold standard of playout and channel origination. We anticipate a refresh in 2025 and 2026. This refresh is driven by end of support of thousands of Spectrum channels that we have deployed in the field today. Now let's take a look at our second engine, our cloud business.

This is where the growth opportunity is and where we expect to drive $100 million of recurring revenue by 2026. VOS and our cloud business have grown at 59% from 2020 to 2023 and this is where we see the most potential to continue to grow our revenue. Our growing cloud business falls into three main buckets. As you can see here, most of the business today is in live sports streaming and linear and VOD streaming. As you can see from the logos, we're trusted across the globe with the industry's strongest players. From pure streamers to renowned sports providers, telcos, service providers, and the largest broadcasters and pay TV operators in the world, they all use and trust our technology for their business. Now that we understand what's behind the existing business, let's take a look at our growth opportunities that get us so excited.

The first is a continued growth of live sports streaming. Fans are really shifting more and more to streaming and sports are becoming the most valuable asset in television. The views get better experience. Streaming can easily reach every corner of the globe and it's not restricted at all. And that experience includes much more innovation from joining progress to highlights, multi views, 4K HDR and more. And this is why the viewership is increasing. And with that increase in advertisement and ability to better address the fan base. In addition, we've seen the recent announcements that more and more sports streaming events are moving exclusively to streaming and this is where the opportunity is. So why is Harmonic and VOS solution best positioned to capitalize on this massive growth? First and foremost, exceptional quality.

Take an example, these tweets and the second tweet from a sports reporter stating, this has been the best I've ever seen for soccer streaming ever. And this is all powered by VOS360 streaming platform. With the cost of sports rights and the amount of money tied to each live event, there's zero tolerance for issues. This is paramount for the content owners. You cannot miss Messi's goal in the World Cup or miss a touchdown in the NFL playoffs or the last shot in Game 3 of the NBA Finals. This is where we shine, bringing our broadcast standards and expertise to the streaming world. We have a seasoned 24/7 Global DevOps team that practically monitors these feeds and the tech running them and this solution is proven at scale and at the largest scale in live sports streaming in North America ever.

In 2021 we hit a milestone peak of 6.3 concurrent viewers with the Super Bowl which overlaps with the Olympics. Fast forward to 2022. We reach a high of 10 million concurrent viewers when we stream the FIFA Soccer World Cup across the globe. In January this year we reached an unbelievable milestone of over 16 million concurrent viewers in the largest streaming event in North America. As Nimrod mentioned in his opening comments, this was all on our VOS platform and always zero issues and broadcast quality. From a technology perspective, VOS is fully integrated with the leading ad providers and CMS vendors and we have an array of features dedicated for live sports, including higher video quality for specific event watermarking to protect from piracy and of course server side ad insertion allowing to monetize these premium events and we're ready for the future.

At the latest NAB show, we demonstrated partnership for advanced workflows using AI. Producing a tier one sports event with a timeline and highlights requires quite a lot of manual labor. With AI we can enable the same experience for lower tier sports with no manpower required at all. In addition, we continue our investment in advanced video codecs to allow for better quality for less bandwidth. We're excited. Our first implementation of VVC will go live in the upcoming Olympics in Paris with around 40% bit rate savings versus HEVC. Now switch to the second major growth opportunity and that's with AdTech. For streaming, the portion of dollars spent in targeted ads is just increasing as you can see in this chart, and streaming allows for targeted ads with monetization based on the actual viewership.

This is critical for sports and live events that we just discussed and we're adding new ad formats that expand this even further and yield a higher price per ad. This is where we have some great innovation in a sporting event. We all know that during a timeout or the end of the quarter, we'll be hit by commercial. So we get up, we grab another bite to eat or refresh our drink. This is why we invested in our new stream advertisement technology. This tech creates ad insertion opportunities while staying in the live action. This captures the viewers without leaving the game and yielding a far higher CPM per ad inserted.

As you can see here in this clip, we're in the middle of the live action of a basketball game and while there's a lull in the action, the player is walking to the free throw line. We insert a double box as you can see here. Effectively, we've just created a new ad opportunity that didn't exist before. Because this is streaming and performed server-side, it can be targeted and monetized per the actual viewer, allowing multiple different versions yielding yet again a higher CPM. All of this is driven by VOS platform with the same reliability and strict broadcast standards that we discussed before. The solution can handle the scale of even the most demanding sporting events as it's built for scale and reliability from the ground up.

Looking at all the innovation and the growth opportunities, they lay the path for us reaching that $100 million of recurring revenue by 2026. The bridge that you can see here on the left takes up 2023 revenue and expands it in three main categories. Well, first we have some natural expansion from our existing customers, but then add on top of that the targeted ad insertion with the new stream advertisement that we just discussed. The second is new tier one customers. They're moving from a traditional on-prem appliance-based workflow to the cloud or hybrid models of on-prem and cloud. And the third is the live sports streaming that we have modestly forecasted growing by 15% of the existing 50% of the existing run rate. So there could be upside in this segment as more sports streaming rights are purchased.

With that, I'd like to thank you all and hand it back to Walter to walk us through the financials of the business.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Thank you, Gil. Now I'd like to present our 2026 target financial model for video. Based on what Gil just discussed and our expectations for both appliances and SaaS within video, we're anticipating $215 million in revenue for video in 2026. That reflects a -1% three year compound annual growth rate based on a -12% three year compound annual growth rate for appliances, which is in line with the expected TAM reductions that Gil mentioned. This is offset with a 25% three year compound annual growth rate for the SaaS business. During Gil's presentation he mentioned the potential refresh cycle in appliances during 2025 and 2026.

Although that poses some potential upside opportunity for video, the exact timing on refresh cycles is difficult to predict and for purposes of our target model, we are choosing to be conservative based on what we believe to be a more sustainable revenue base in appliances. We're targeting non-GAAP video gross margin of 64% and expansion of 310 basis points from our 2023 actuals based on our expectations for SaaS revenue growth as this becomes a larger portion of our business. As mentioned earlier in the presentation, we've embarked on a restructuring program which is expected to significantly improve our video profitability. This program is expected to deliver $28 million in cost savings in FY 2025 and beyond. Based on our restructuring actions and the growth drivers discussed earlier, we're expecting to achieve $30 million in adjusted EBITDA or 14% adjusted EBITDA margin in video for 2026.

As mentioned in our presentation, our key focus in video is driving sustained long term profitability for the business. This completes our formal presentation today and we would like to now open the lines. For questions.

Operator

Please press star one one on your telephone. If your question has been answered, you wish to move yourself from the queue, please press star one one again. We'll pause for a moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Ryan Koontz with Needham. Your line is open.

Hi, thanks for the question. Appreciate the presentation today. With regards to the fiber operation opportunity, how do you compare that on a revenue per subscriber basis compared to DOCSIS for Harmonic?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Hey Ryan, so I'll start and I'll let Dan to expand on that. Largely speaking it's about the same. Perhaps the number of widgets or ports you may need will be different, but as you know the split ratio is different. You can put a node for cable that will serve 500 subscribers and the OLT for fiber may split to 128, 64, or 32. So you may need higher density and higher count of ports. So at the high level we would say it's largely the same. Then you want to add anything on top?

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

Yeah, I think the one data point I would add for you Ryan, is that the capacity of the remote OLT node is several times higher in terms of subscriber count. So a Ripple might support in excess of 2,000 subscribers in fiber to the home mode. So we see a volume opportunity to serve more subscribers from each location.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

All right, that's super helpful, thanks. On your open ONU strategy, I certainly understand that, you know, what kind of costs are you incurring to kind of qualify all these partners? You know, certainly the tier one's are going to kind of dictate to you, I'm sure, who they want to use for the right size opportunity. Apart from that, where it's not a volume driven business, how are you kind of carrying those costs to qualify the ONU suppliers?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah, so I'll start by first of all, the fiber market is not as open and interoperable as the DOCSIS cable market where you have CableLabs. So identifying this along with the kind of book-ended proprietary that some of our competitors are serving, we decided to embark on that. And indeed it's an investment that we needed to make not just in equipment, but also automating that and being able to repeat that with each and every release we get out the door and we get from the ONU. Dan, you want to add more on how we manage that internally and with customers?

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

Yeah, I think you hit on it, Nimrod. It's through automated test processes and the structure around it. There are some industry standards to also facilitate. Specifically CableLabs and BBF.247 are helping, but it's predominantly driven by our ability to automate and leverage our experience integrating with a wide range of third-party devices from our DOCSIS history. That's making it sustainable on the fiber to the home side.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

Got it. And so I assume those partners are primarily driven by your customer feedback on who to work with there.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah, we certainly prioritize customer request. We also try to prioritize that by what we see in the market in terms of new technology, type of silicon and so forth.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

Got it. And maybe one last question on the broadband side, you know, great to hear about your kind of strategic direction towards edge cloud as well as kind of cloud hosted subscription services. Do you have any other models out there? I know you guys have this kind of intelligent bandwidth product that just came out, but any other sorts of examples of that that you guys have in mind for kind of layer on applications. Applications for cOS.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

So a couple of things and I'll let Asaf expand on that. From the platform point of view, we are exploring other directions. I can give you one other example. We touched on the complexity of scaling live events such as the Super Bowl and this is actually putting a lot of stress on CDN network. So one idea you can think of is that you cache and replicate live sports event at the very edge of the network, which would be the cOS platform. There could be other applications such as I touched on the downloading of new games re lease. So this is like one file that has to get to a lot of users in a very short amount of time. So these are ideas. There could be other ideas related to AI. We are open-minded about that.

Looking at opportunities and Asaf, maybe you want to add from the platform point of view, kind of. What else?

Asaf Matatyaou
SVP Broadband Products, Harmonic

Yeah, thanks Nimrod. So we look at it from an opportunity point of view, looking at big data versus fast data and things that have the value, the subscriber of bringing it closer as the underlying foundation that enables us to bring other applications. We call it application bundles. And the example of Beacon, for example, running on our platform is simply just another application. So when we look at these other opportunities, we know that the underlying platform gives it high performance and high availability. And that way we can evaluate and install and take advantage of those opportunities on our existing install base. And I think as we look at the customer experience and subscriber enrichment, we will discover new opportunities that bring that fast data closest to the customer to the subscriber.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

Got it. Yeah, it sounds like a real interesting opportunity as it evolves. I assume that in addition that cOS has sorts of APIs that your largest customers could even develop their own apps for that. Is that accurate?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yes, absolutely. As Asaf mentioned, we have the capability we called application bundles where they can bring their own application and load it on the platform.

Okay, great. And just one last one with regards to the ad insertion, I know you guys have had some announcements in the last few months about this kind of in-stream advertising. Is that something that you're uniquely able to do because you're the streaming platform or do other ad insertion or you're competing there with other ad insertion technologies that can essentially do the same thing? But there's APIs that other ad platforms could plug into the sports streaming.

Gil, want to take that?

Gil Rudge
SVP Video Products and Solutions, Harmonic

Yeah, that's a great question, Ryan. So there are some folks that are doing it, the main differentiation. So I mean, I'll answer two ways. First of all, we can do it if we're the video pipeline, but we can also do it if the customer has an existing video pipeline and we can layer that on top. The real differentiation that we have here with this technology is really the scale and reliability because when you have a live sports event, it scales at a massive rate, the beginning of event and you have to scale all the infrastructure and then add that during the game and add it seamlessly with the reliability that we're talking about in presentation. That really is where what we provide shines and slightly different. So again, it can work with whoever has Harmonic as a video pipeline, but it can also work if.

If the customer has a different pipeline in place.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

Got it. So sounds like we should think of this as another product or a module for the streaming business, and the next kind of follow-up on that is, can this also be applicable to the appliance business, to the linear business? Is there ability to do, so to speak, an in-stream for appliances, or is appliances always broadcast only?

Gil Rudge
SVP Video Products and Solutions, Harmonic

So appliances primarily broadcast only, if you will. But there are opportunities actually in the with some of the cable providers and not some of the opportunities that we're seeing now where they have their existing QAM streams and they have their, if you will, OTT streams within their platform and they start they need to require ad parity between the legacy QAM and the OTT. And we're deploying some of those solutions today with the same technology. Once that's deployed, we can now adding targeted ads in infrastructure and this new in-stream ad technology. So basically the multiple opportunities except for the standard streaming applications. So it is something that we're really, really excited about because of multiple opportunities to exploit that technology.

Got it. Great. And maybe Walter, one last one for you on the gross margins on cable. Sounds like you're expecting a stronger mix of hardware there in terms of the gross margin targets. What are the kind of puts and takes there that we should think about gross margins going forward? Is that you feel like that's a baseline or a conservative estimate or you're expecting stronger share in hardware generally. That'd be helpful. Thank you.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Certainly. Ryan. I think with regards to our gross margin projections in the target model, they are based on taking a more cautious approach. If you think about what's occurred, there's the whole wave of migration that's taking place, as Nimrod mentioned earlier in the presentation, in terms of customers. And so as we see 2026, which is less than a couple years away, we expect to continue to see early deployment migrations with new customers. And so that will warrant a higher mix of devices. And so based on that, we are being responsible in terms of our view of what that mix will look like. We're still in the early stages of deployments. When we look at those waves of deployments, when we look at the buildup of not only the largest customers, but the wave of customers coming behind that.

We definitely want to make sure that we're capturing footprint and that we're looking at the appropriate mix in terms of what that will look like. Is that the long term view of the business? No. Expectation is, as we continue to get through those early deployments, that the mix of the business will be more favorable to the margins.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director of Research Analyst, Needham

Super helpful. Thanks, Walter. That's all I've got. I'll get back in.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Thanks Ryan.

Operator

Our next question comes from Simon Leopold of Raymond James. Your line is open.

Simon Leopold
Managing Director, Raymond James

Great. Thank you for taking the question. A couple things I wanted to explore here, one of which is what are you thinking about the possibility that the industry consolidates or integrates FDX and ESD technology into a unified device? I'm hearing that that's being discussed and wondering if, first of all, what you think of that possibility and two, if it happens, does that lead to a push of your opportunities out of this year and pushes them down the line into 2025 and 2026? Anything you can offer on sort of this scenario or possibility then I've got a couple of quick follow-ups. Thanks.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

So, a couple of things. We think that any technology that will unify the two flavors of DOCSIS 4.0 is very positive news for the industry. Cable has all along been very unified like the DOCSIS generations supported by CableLabs. I think that helped it a lot to basically be the leading broadband platform. And admittedly ESD FDX created some confusion or some even delays of decisions. I think that as you mentioned, the unified silicon end to end all the way to the CPE, from the network to the CPE is going to simplify the decision because at that point you don't really have to decide how to deploy it. It's more about, okay, this technology is available, I'm going to put it into my network, it's backward compatible to DOCSIS 3.1.

Even if I have a preference for one versus the other, I can use that and then I can change that over time. So I think that's great news for the industry. Kind of remove the confusion we clearly have. We believe in DAA because it means that the technology will have to support FDX and ESD and we've got both technologies. In terms of pushout, we don't see that pushing out anything. What we discussed is our DOCSIS 4.0 deployment is progressing and is not dependent on Unified. It will transition to Unified once available, but there is no dependency on Unified to push that forward for the other DOCSIS 4.0. In fact, we believe that Unified will, will kind of accelerate decision making and simplify the decisions for the relevant operators.

Simon Leopold
Managing Director, Raymond James

Great, that's very helpful. The other thing is I wonder if you can offer some thoughts on the fact that one of your competitors is buying the assets of another now bankrupt competitor. I can't imagine that that changes things much for you, but just if you've got any thoughts on how that might affect the industry as a whole?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah, Walter, you want to start kind of your perspective on that?

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Well, I think what we've seen here is consolidation as a result of what's happening at the high level, which is the migration to vCMTS and DAA. And I think that's the big driving factor in terms of, you know, some of the other competitors having to, you know, take certain actions. And I think we're in a position where we actually see this as a positive. It's a proof point that we're moving in that direction. I think from a customer standpoint, maybe Nimrod will want to elaborate on this. This is where we see customers needing to make decisions in terms of the direction they go and if anything having to make those decisions quicker.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah. So maybe to add on, Walter, the fact that they made that consolidation move basically and we assume that they will consolidate the virtual core product means that this is a priority for them. This is where they see the future of this broadband access. I think it also eliminate one competitor because they will, you know, from two to one. So this is one other thing to consider. But we think this is a good indication for the industry transition to this new modern architecture where we feel we have a unique advantage in terms of our footprint and experience in running these kind of new architectures and this virtual implementation. Asaf. You want to add anything on kind of the change itself and the virtual architecture?

Asaf Matatyaou
SVP Broadband Products, Harmonic

Yeah, I think that it also shows that it's not easy to get to do it. I think it's, you know, investing in a platform and then virtualization on top of that is not something that is trivial and it takes time to get it right. So I think the investments we've made will continue carrying forward our unique position and we'll see how it plays out with that investment in the industry.

Simon Leopold
Managing Director, Raymond James

Great. And then the follow-up is hopefully pretty easy. In the past you've broken out the expectations for your fiber to the X revenue within broadband. Just wondering how you're thinking that contributes to that $800 million 2026 target. Thank you.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Yeah, maybe I'll kick it off. Simon, thanks for the question. In regards to the breakouts, we had previously broken out the fiber from the total number and what, you know, when Dan presented, I think it was a very good way to look at what's happening in the fiber space, especially for us. We've got a lot of customers that are hybrid customers, so they're purchasing both DOCSIS as well as fiber. And if you remember the slide that Dan presented with the Ripple, you could have that basically facilitating both of the knowledge. So it's not something that we can allocate with precision with. That said, when we look back at what we said a couple years ago in terms of where the fiber business is expected to be, we're still on that path in terms of fiber being that size in 2026.

And so when you refer back to the slide that Nimrod presented earlier, he broke out that TAM, the addressable market that we're going after between cable operators as well as tier two and tier three initially. And so think about that in terms of, you know, the overlap in our solution in those situations. That's why we haven't broken it out with precision. But we're on track and maybe the team can talk a little bit more about some of the proof points we've had along the way here on the fiber side.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah, I'll just say that we're on that path. If you go and manually calculate the contribution of fiber, I would say at the end of 2023, it was in the $ tens of millions. So it's focusing towards that target. We talked about kind of the two key markets in cable and in telco. The telco tier two and three is still early on. This is an area of investment in cable. It's an area that we already see success. But even in pure telco customers, we already have several of these customers running on our platform. So this is certainly progressing. Dan, anything to add?

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

I think you and Walter have covered it well.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Okay, thanks.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Yep. Thank you, Simon.

Operator

Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. We also ask that you limit yourself to two questions, if possible, to accommodate as many people as possible. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Steven Frankel with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open.

Steven Frankel
Director of Research, Rosenblatt Securities

Good morning and thank you for doing this today. I'd like to take another cut at that 2026 broadband forecast and maybe give us some insight into how much revenue would you attribute to customers that you already have today versus what's in the pipeline?

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Sure, I'll start with that one. Steve, thanks for the question. So with regards to the customer mix that we have in 2026, when we compare to today 2024 and we look at the top two customers as compared to everybody else as a key metric that we're focused on, we see a material shift down in terms of the percent of those top two from 2024 to 2026, highlighting the faster growth in the rest of the customer set as we might as their networks migrate and impact that revenue forecast.

Steven Frankel
Director of Research, Rosenblatt Securities

But any detail on kind of how much of this is a lot of those customers that have kind of been in the waiting room the last couple years are going to be ramping up versus discounting what's in the pipeline to get to that number. Trying to understand your visibility on that number.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Yeah. So when we built up our model for 2026 and the team spent time looking at it from, as I mentioned in the earlier part of the presentation, both the top-down as well as a bottoms-up, looking at all the customers that we've won and are just in the early stages of deployment as well as customers that we're targeting in terms of wins. So as you know we already have 113 customers aligned in the broadband segment and so a big part of the growth comes from those customers migrating their networks. In addition, there's elements of additional win and expansion that the team has built in as part of the view in pulling together a bottoms-up picture of the customer mix to achieve that number in 2026.

Steven Frankel
Director of Research, Rosenblatt Securities

Okay. And then maybe take one more cut at it. So when we get to 2026 and you look across your customer base kind of where do we think we are in deployment? Are we a third of the way there? Are we 3/4 of the way deployed by 2026? And what inning will we be in 2026?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

I think it will vary by customers. Those that started early on may be in a more advanced stage of the rollout but at that point in time we may see them starting to shift to more and more fiber depending on which strategy they will take. So we certainly see growth beyond 2026, whether it's fiber, whether it's completing the migration. These projects are multi-year by definition. You could see that kind of over the last couple of years with key customers that have shared progress that they made. I think recent update from Comcast that they will be 50% of their network by end of 2024 was an indication and they were fairly early in the program.

Steven Frankel
Director of Research, Rosenblatt Securities

Great. Thank you so much.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Thanks, Steve.

Operator

Our next question comes from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Hi, good morning. I wanted to follow up on that discussion about the diversification of the business maybe along a couple of lines. But first, Walter, you mentioned that percentage from the top two going down. Try and pin you down a little bit on that. Would you see that below 50% of the broadband business in the 2026 time frame or can you give us any other metrics?

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Well, I think the way to look at it, Tim, is that if you look at, you know, the subscribers across the whole globe as we've kind of highlighted previously, and then you think about those two customers, you know, they've got a certain big share of the market from a substantial subscriber standpoint. So that's one metric to focus on. I think we've kind of said it before. They make up about a third of the market as we look forward. And I don't want to get pinned down on any specific percentage, but I think in terms of, you know, the thought process, will they be more than that one third? Absolutely. There are significant customers. We expect to hold the share we hold with those customers today.

To my earlier point, we definitely, when we've modeled this out with the team and looked at our model for 2026, we've seen a reduction from where we are this year and it's material in terms of significance, in terms of dropping down.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Okay, thanks. And you mentioned share and that was kind of where I was going to head next. And I think we've got 26 targets and 27 TAMs. But even working with that a little bit, you know, it looks like your current DOCSIS share is something on the order of 70%. It seems like you're making an assumption that you know, declines a bit over the next few years and you know, kind of correct me if I'm wrong there in terms of what's implied market share wise in your 26 target. Maybe let's just focus on that in DOCSIS and I'll follow up on fiber.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Sure, Tim. So first of all, in terms of looking at the market, I think the one thing I'll emphasize is there's the addressable market, the TAM, the top-down view. But as I mentioned just a minute ago, we also did a bottom-up view. And so our key assumptions around our 2026 numbers you know, based on the top two customers, you know, holding share. When we look at the rest of the market, we are being more conservative and having a slightly less share as we look forward. And that's how we've built up our numbers to be on the cautious side in terms of the roll-up of the 2026 number.

So that's the comments I'll make around, you know, how we use tam, but we also leverage a bottoms-up view from the team in terms of migrations, expectations, et cetera. So you know, when you look at share percentages, you keep that in mind. But I think you've correctly identified that we do have some conservatism in customer base. And what I'm referring to here is, you know, beyond the top two customers as we think through the next few years.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Great. Okay. Another element of that could be continued growth in the TAM I think you were talking about. I realized this is a while ago, but a $900 billion TAM for 2025 and I think we're now looking at $1.25 billion or so for 2027. So there's some pretty nice growth there. Similarly, on the fiber side, I think similar dynamic which, you know, I think previous share assumptions were around 20% of the TAM for cable PON. But you're adding kind of the rural telco market into that equation. And so I assume that share assumption kind of ought to be less than that original target as well given the expanded TAM in rural. Is that a fair way to look at it?

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

It's a fair way to look at it. If you look at the, where the traction is today in the business, obviously heavily with the cable operators, this hybrid concepts that both Nimrod and Dan alluded to earlier. In addition to that, you know, as we've mentioned before, we built up our investment in our go to market team focused around those initially around those tier two and three operators just in terms of speed of being able to win deals in that domain. Our solution set is valid for tier ones in that fiber telco space as well. That's why post 2027 we continue to see our addressable market growing because we'll, we'll start looking at, at the tier ones as, as well.

I don't know if Dan or Nimrod would like to elaborate on that further because I think it's a very important point in terms of how we look at the market and how we see the growth going forward.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah, I guess our initial priority for the telco market is for the tier two and three where we believe we have a unique differentiation. It's also a market that we believe can yield faster results relative to the tier one market. That takes much longer, much longer to win. In terms of the relevance of our technology, it will be as relevant for the tier ones. We know how to win tier ones, but we know that it takes a bigger investment and longer time.

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

I would add to that, just think about some of our larger wins and some of the customers we serve, they have hybrid operations where they are both cable and telco operators. So we actually have proof points serving some of the larger operators with fiber technologies as well. So to Walter's point, as our customer acquisition strategy evolves, we will be able to expand our serviceable market in the future.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Great, thanks. Last question for me. Here I'm looking for customer count metrics and that is around, you know, can you give us any color on the number of current tier two, tier three telco fiber wins and, or can you give us a sense of the size of the active pipeline from a customer perspective?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

So on fiber, we talked and we share the metric of total customers. 113 fiber-specific opportunities out of that is a couple of dozens where many are cable or hybrid operation and several we don't share the exact count are pure fiber. As, as we said, this is a relatively new area of investment and we expect to grow that. Our key internal metric is to match or get as close as we can to our 113 which obviously keeps growing. At this point we are a couple of dozens into that 113.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Okay, real last question here. You know, can you describe, you know, obviously you're looking a little farther out, but can you describe the current state of your tier one engagement on the fiber side and when would you like to see, you know, some sort of field or lab trial or activity? What, what are your expectations there?

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Let's see, we did talk about the fact that Comcast is deploying our fiber solution. They talked about that as well. They use our devices and our virtual BNG.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Yeah.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Outside of cable for tier one, we don't have any direct focus like the, you know, the AT&T. Verizon is not an area that we're focusing on right now.

Tim Savageaux
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets

Okay, thanks

Operator

again ladies and gentlemen. If you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone. Our next question comes from George Notter with Jefferies. Your line is open.

George Notter
Managing Director, Jefferies

Hi guys. Thanks. I guess I'm kind of sitting back here and listening to this whole dialogue and you know, I have to admit it feels like your business historically hasn't been super predictable. And you know, listening to how you guys are parsing the different aspects of the business and where the growth is coming from, it's sort of implies a level of precision that I'm not sure is really here. And you know, as evidence, I would point to, you know, some of these sessions you guys have done in the past, some of the numbers that you guys have outlined and, you know, they didn't really pan out.

And so I guess I just want to kind of level set here and think a little bit about, you know, why are you guys setting these expectations? Why is it important for investors? Like, why does it make sense to really kind of feel like there is a lot of precision in this whole process when maybe there hasn't been in the past? Sorry for the tough question, but I think it's worth asking George.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

No, I like the question in that, you know, it gives us an opportunity to tell you a little bit more exactly about, you know, the process we've embarked on as we went through this as a team to build up our view. Certainly things evolve and certainly the environment changes on an ongoing basis. I'll just point to, you know, the current market conditions at a macro level definitely impact and shift timing of when people are going to spend on those large projects in terms of, you know, the amount of, you know, diligence around looking at the markets, not just from a, you know, as I mentioned earlier, tops down perspective, but a bottoms up and really evaluating the customers. The customers we have today.

The migration plans and looking at all of the key initiatives that we've talked about today give us, you know, an ability to kind of bring those two elements together, both from a top down and a bottoms up perspective to evaluate what are we setting as our target model for 2026 based on the migrations that have to occur. You heard from Nimrod and the team earlier, in terms of status quo is not an option. The migrations and the reason for the migrations that need to occur and we're starting to see a lot more activity and it gives us confidence in terms of the trajectory of not only the largest customers, but as we go through the entire customer set.

Maybe I'll ask Nimrod to perhaps provide a little more color on that because I think that's really a key driver in terms of giving us a level of confidence in building up this target model for Broadband.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah. Walter, I think going back in time, when we projected the business, we were at the time when this technology was used by very few early adopter customers. And you can understand with a small sample of customers that revenue can be, or size of the market can be lumpy with a very small set of customers. I think fast forward to today, we cross the chasm. There is no single customer, single operator that is not positive on the architecture. If I go back in time, even our competitors were challenging the viability of the architecture. It's not going to work, it's not going to scale. I don't think anyone is doubting that today. So I think that's one key point. I think the other maybe two other important factors.

You know, we work with customers who until a while ago had a very fixed plan to go to fiber. But guess what? Cost of capital and the complexity and time that it takes to go to go full fiber overbuild themselves, made them more realistic and kind of look into, hey, what can we do to maintain our subscriber base? And if we're not gonna, if we're not gonna invest in the network, we're gonna lose them while we kind of wait to go full fiber. And I guess the last, the. Well, two other factors. I think the competitive environment for broadband have changed. two years ago or even 18 months ago, fixed wireless was not a competitor. Now we have both fiber and fixed wireless that are putting a lot of pressure on cable. And I think the third point is availability of technology.

If back then it was either going to DOCSIS 4.0 or fiber. I think the one we talked about earlier is introducing a simpler, faster upgrade opportunity, much cheaper, which really gives you fiber speeds. Maybe not on the upstream, but 1 Gbps on the upstream, 1.5 Gbps and up to 8 Gbps on the downstream. So I think when you take all of that together, this is contributing to our performance update today and the way we look at the next couple of years.

George Notter
Managing Director, Jefferies

Okay, thank you very much.

Dan Gledhill
SVP Broadband Fiber, Harmonic

Thank you.

Walter Jankovic
CFO, Harmonic

Thank you, George.

Operator

I'm not showing any further questions this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Nimrod for any closing remarks.

Nimrod Ben-Natan
President and CEO, Harmonic

Yeah. Well, thank you all for joining us today. I hope this session provided you with a better understanding of our vision, how we look at the market, the strategy, the technology differentiation, and our unique market position. We certainly have a lot of work ahead. New markets that we're getting into, expanding the business. There is consolidation in the market kind of changes, changes in the competitive environment. But I think the foundation that we built, the market position that we have today, is a great foundation for the future. And we're excited and committed to keep executing on our growth plan. So I want to thank you again and have a great day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.

Powered by