Cinegy Air PRO

Cinegy

cinegy.com

CATEGORY
Cloud Infrastructures - Playout

At Cinegy we take the credit for having come up with some nice slogans that not always made us friends in the industry. “SDI MUST DIE” is a classic already. Another one is “Software Defined Television”, which does not have quite the same ring to it, but it describes almost entirely what Cinegy is about.

For more than ten years Cinegy has been stating that almost anything that then was still done using bespoke broadcast hardware could be done entirely in software on commodity PC hardware just given enough processing power. This is not a revelation in today’s software and cloud-focused world, but Cinegy did all this before many of these buzz words had been invented.

The trailblazer in terms of using massive scalable computer power is not the broadcast industry, but the High-Performance Computing industry – be it scientific number crunching to simulate nuclear fusion or mega scale machine learning. Massive parallel processing mostly based in GPUs is the current state of the art. The developers at Cinegy have been involved with GPU-accelerated video processing for more than twenty years. From 3D-LUT based real-time colour correction to GPU-based video codecs, Cinegy has developed a wide range of GPU-based technology.

Over the last years, Cinegy has applied more and more of its GPU technology to its flagship playout product Cinegy Air PRO. Dealing with resolutions such as SD and even HD was still easily accomplished by using the proverbial bigger hammer – a faster CPU. With UHD this already started to become a problem as despite the famous Moore’s Law CPU performance did not double every two years and neither did the PC systems bus speed. Going from HD to UHD expecting the same number of channels per server was a challenge. Now it is 8K and the performance demand has more than quadrupled once more. HDR and higher color fidelity add further bandwidth and computing requirements. Finally, in an ideal IP-based world the output should be readily encoded for cable, satellite and OTT delivery.

While 8K is not relevant yet for the majority of the broadcasting world this translates into the following: less than one CPU core and a fraction of a new mid-size NVIDA GPU per HD playout channel (including H.264 or HEVC encoding and streaming output). To put it into cloud terms: four channels of HD playout from the smallest AWS EC with GPU instance. This brings the AWS price per HD channel down to unprecedented levels of $0.25/h or $6 per day - without using any of the available discounts. This also means you can easily put more than 1000x HD channels into a single 19” rack if you want to stay on-premise. Hyper-local ad insertion or program breakouts? Localised graphics for every head-end?

The idea that everyone can have their own private TV channel – and we are not talking OTT here, but a proper TV channel with sophisticated branding and all bells and whistles, which again could be an OTT live feed.

Cinegy Air PRO now also has full SRT support for live signal inputs and IP output delivery.

Cinegy Air PRO allows disruptive business models or to come up with completely new ones.