From The NAB Exhibit Floor: Cinegy

Cinegy | Booth SL11116 | Website: https://home.cinegy.com/

Cinegy is highlighting a number of products and services at the NAB Show. They include:

“Cinegy as a Service,” a hardware-free way of enabling users to deploy software-defined television on cloud-based virtual machines. All of Cinegy’s software technology, starting with Cinegy’s real-time playout server and broadcast automation software, Cinegy Air, will steadily migrate to cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) enabling prospective users to spin up, test drive, and, if they choose, deploy Cinegy technology in an HD or 4K cloud.

Cinegy CEO Jan Weigner said, “Expensive broadcast hardware is now someone else’s problem. You can open your broadcast tap high, low, or not at all as required and pay for what you use, when you use it rather than watch your capital swirl down the drain.”

The benefits of Cinegy’s approach of having the software hosted on GPU-friendly Amazon Web Services (AWS) are multiple. Users only pay for what they need, when they need it. There’s no upfront investment. Requirements for increases in system capacity, such as election or special event coverage, can also be far more accurately planned and costed. And because the cloud vendor provides hardware resiliency and data protection, it eliminates the need for those resources in-house.

“That’s another beauty of Cinegy as a Service,” said Weigner. “If you want to give it a try, just fire it up and take it for a test drive. No obligation. No fuss. If you like it you can buy it or rent it for as long as you need it. It’s entirely up to you.”

Cinegy launched Cinegy Air PRO Version 11, its latest real-time playout server and multi-channel broadcast automation software. In addition to support for high frame rate Ultra HD formats (50/60p), Cinegy Air PRO Version 11 has integrated HEVC stream encoding with specific NVidia graphics cards, plus the ability if required to offload HEVC and H.264 stream encoding to the NVidia GPU.

Cinegy Air PRO Version 11’s loudness limiter enables users to ensure that content complies with EBU R128 and CALM loudness regulations. For Australian broadcasters, Version 11 also supports OP42/47 subtitling requirements.

Version 11 also sports Cinegy’s next-generation of in-built channel branding, which works in a cloud or virtual environment. This makes it easy to control multiple channels that air the same content but require regionalized commercials and branding.

Existing Cinegy Air users with a valid service level agreement can upgrade to Version 11 at no cost.

Cinegy announced that Lakeland Public TV (LPTV), a PBS affiliate serving northern and central Minnesota, has installed Cinegy software modules to replace its aging Avid FastBreak Automation hardware-based, playout, channel branding, and EAS system.

PBS as an organization is transitioning to file-based content delivery to member stations. LPTV wanted a system that tracked with the PBS initiative, and investigated a number of alternative hardware- and software-based solutions. However, in the end, LPTV turned to Cinegy and its IPbased, software-defined television concept for the complete package.

LPTV takes content from PBS’s IP-over-satellite file store with its Myers ProTrack broadcast management system, which centralises content metadata and facilitates multiple distribution workflows. ProTrack now moves the content to Cinegy Air playout storage via an FTP command generated by ProTrack.

Using native IP or baseband ingest support inside Cinegy Capture for recording, and Cinegy Air for playout, the upgraded LPTV system can record and playout satellite downlinks directly, without SDI, and output in both IP and SDI for monitoring and broadcast.

“Cinegy Open,” an initiative to make powerful tools and useful information freely available to the public. Cinegy’s API’s have been traditionally used internally to develop, test and continuously improve its industry leading software solutions, an approach that is similar in many companies. However, Cinegy is turning this practice on its head by putting all of its APIs, manuals, and documentation out for public consumption. They will be updated automatically on a regular basis via a new Cinegy website, open.cinegy.com. Cinegy Open will also offer a wide range of highly useful ‘Cinegy Open Tools’ designed for the IP convergence space , some under open source license, that can be downloaded for free and unconditional use without even having to register. These tools, including codec and stream analysis tools, can be used individually or across an industry to test, check, analyse, convert, or benchmark new solutions or even product rollouts.

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