CANAL+ Polska deployed Cinegy Air PRO and Capture PRO integrated, software-based playout to support extra HD and UHD channels, meeting a growing demand for high quality content.
CANAL+ Polska publishes and broadcasts premium TV channels. Serving as an aggregator, it is one of the largest pay TV package distributors in Poland. Currently, the company needs to meet a growing demand for high quality content and recently undertook an expansion of its playout capability to support further HD and Ultra HD channels.
CANAL+ Polska has deployed a combination of Cinegy Air PRO and Cinegy Capture PRO, working with systems integrator Studiotech Poland to find a reliable, price-competitive software-based system that is scalable, customisable and simple to keep up to date.
Hubert Pogorzelski, TV Production Systems Manager at CANAL+ Polska, commented, “The new Cinegy system wasn’t difficult to implement. It can be booted extremely fast, and adding new channels is a rapid, straightforward process. The system delivers robust core functionality for our playout needs – which for us means reliable 24/7 operation – and we're collaborating with Cinegy to expand capabilities further.
Integrated Software
Cinegy Capture PRO handles acquisition and transcoding as a unified task on centralised networks, ingesting material and generating edit or web proxies in nearly all major formats and containers.
Addressing playout, Cinegy Air’s integrated software runs on TCP/IP network-attached real-time service appliances, giving users a broadcast automation front-end and a real-time video server for playout up to UHD and/or 8K. Through the software, they can control multiple channels playing to air, or plan schedules, program and commercial blocks offline. Various remote or local users can control the schedule and playout operation.
Users can play out mixed format and mixed resolution content, as well as unrendered edit sequences straight to air, inserting a logo or overlay from the same central automation panel, and control external devices with secondary events. Simulcasting output via SDI, NDI and/or IP streams for ATSC/DVB or web use is also possible, and SRT support is available for delivery and reception over WAN and Internet.
“We can also now operate it as a channel-in-a-box for some of our services, in particular the thematic channels we deliver.” This operation is possible due to the system’s input interfaces for video ingest, real-time video processing of DVE and graphics, the ability to store content for immediate use and interfaces to obtain related content, as well as interfaces to play out the final production
Customisation and Expansion
As part of the project, Cinegy’s Professional Services team, led by product manager Simon Pilbeam, added some user-specific functionality. This included support for Kantar watermarking and the additional specific counters in the GUI. Kantar supplies and tracks unique, machine-audible identifiers for media content, and the GUI counters store the number and timing of tracking events.
“As well as increasing the number of channels, CANAL+ Polska is actively implementing closed captioning,” said Mike Efimov, international sales manager at Cinegy. “We have upgraded a significant part of the broadcast channels to use Air Ultimate, and the Professional Services team is carrying out further developments to expand the functionality."
Above its core functionality, Cinegy Air comes in two other version with extra features. Most of CANAL+ Polska’s channels are using Cinegy Air PRO, which adds CG graphics and titling, while the others that Mike mentioned will use Cinegy Air Ultimate, which also includes one channel of Cinegy Subtitle.
“Modern broadcasters need to protect their investments for the long term and make sure that the systems they deploy are flexible and scalable enough to continue supporting their business and operations strategies as they evolve,” Mike said. www.cinegy.com
