ChyronHego Goes Buying, Expands Offerings

ChryronHego has gone on a bit of a Scandinavian shopping spree, acquiring a majority share of a Norwegian sports tracking company and buying Norwegian weather graphics company. It also has begun to insert Hego’s sports graphics technology into the U.S. marketplace.

During its 2014 NAB Show press conference on April 6 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the company also introduced three products and announced the expansion of its graphics services.

ChyronHego has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Norwegian WeatherOne and its Metacast live-to-air weather graphics and broadcast production system.

The company also has taken a majority stake in ZXY Sport Tracking, a Norwegian provider of transponder-based sports tracking systems. ChyronHego will integrate the ZXY’s transponder tracking technology into its TRACAB optical-based player tracking system.

Players wear a small, light transponder to enable the ZXY system, which allows tracking of their position to within one inch of their actual location, the company said. It also can provide fans viewing at home with the information like the velocity of a hit in football and give coaches vital health stats like heart rate and body temperature.

ChyronHego announced it also has reached an agreement with Major League Baseball to roll out a play tracker combining its own tracking technology with TrackMan’s Doppler radar tracking system. The system currently is in use at Citi Field in New York, Target Field in Minneapolis and Miller Field in Milwaukee.

The company’s new PowerClips SD/HD production clip player is available in 1RU two- and 2RU four-channel versions. The clip server, which uses ChyronHego’s GS2 graphics engine, is MOS-enabled and Blue-Net-ready.

Its new Virtual 1^st on-field graphics generator is a software-based system that does away with the need for camera sensors to generate virtual lines of scrimmage and down and distance graphics to assist fans watching games. Virtual 1^st also can import animated graphics, which can be virtually projected on the field of action.

ChyronHego’s new HeliPaint is a telestrator designed for use by news crews covering events from helicopters. Designed to be used while reporting on the move, HeliPaint uses advanced image tracking to lock graphics in place.

Expanding its graphics services portfolio, ChyronHego announced availability of: interactive graphics for touch-screen projects; dynamic graphics for live sports scores, elections and social media; virtual graphics; and project management, training and creative support.

The company also used the press conference to announce it has completed the integration of Chyron and Hego’s separate product line in the year since the merger of the two companies.

Asked how much more life there is in purpose-built boxes doing distinct production tasks, ChyronHego chief technology officer Soren Kjellin said the company is at its core a software company and that recasting its software to run on generic computer hardware is an important part of its future.

“You and I agree about where this is going,” he said. “We will converge the technologies into components to form products that will give us the capability to provide the components clients want and form more niche products.”