Cinegy showed new playout-focussed delivery platform bundles at IBC for Cinegy Air software suite, Cinegy Multiviewer functions, plus new AI-powered automation for its subtitling service.
Cinegy Air
Cinegy has launched new playout, automation and delivery platform bundles at IBC 2024 for their Cinegy Air software suite. Called Air Pack and Air Infinity, the new bundles are now part of Cinegy Air’s integrated tools for broadcast automation front-end and real-time video server applications for SD, HD, Ultra HD and up to 8K playout.
The company also introduced a new AI-powered automatic subtitling service, and gave a first IBC showing of Cinegy Multiviewer.
Cinegy Air increases flexibility for broadcast and content services through its ability to play compatible format and mixed resolution content as well as un-rendered edit sequences, directly on air. Users can run many channels with configurable features in a single unit, which can take the form of local, physical hardware, a virtual machine or a cloud instance.
Visitors to the Cinegy stand this year could view the company’s virtualised, containerised back-end infrastructure, delivering 64-channels of HD playout from a single physical server. Because the software is containerised, it can run as executable packages that perform consistently, regardless of the machines they run on, and contain all the information the applications need to function. This platform is also used to run Cinegy’s Multiviewer and Capture PRO to handle real-time monitoring and scalable video recording.
Software Bundles for Playout
Managing director at CinegyJan Weigner said, “This IBC’s focus has been on Cinegy’s cloud playout platform, which serves as the building blocks our partners and service providers use to develop their own systems and supply value-added services tailored to their own customer base. Cinegy is recognised for building reliable platforms with extremely low hardware resource footprints, resulting in a low operating cost for developers and great potential in terms of scalability, efficiency and sustainability.”
Cinegy Capture PRO
Air Infinity is an approach to broadcast playout that makes continuity of service the focus of the operation. To prevent the sudden failure of a service or channel and the associated consequences, Air Infinity combines Cinegy Air PRO playout software with the StreamSwitcher IP failover system with an instantaneous response capability that switches over much faster than conventional SDI-based failover systems.
StreamSwitcher diagnoses problems immediately and switches to an alternate path quickly enough to prevent noticeable failover. Cinegy StreamSwitcher is a light-weight software service that requires only a small PC or server system, or a small size VM, to run, plus adequate network connectivity to work.
The new Air Pack is Cinegy’s channel-in-a-box bundle that replaces the earlier TV Pack. Air Pack was developed to be used in a wider variety of possible scenarios and has more deployment flexibility, bundling together Cinegy applications that, in combination, give users all they need to broadcast a TV channel – Cinegy Air PRO, Cinegy Capture PRO and Cinegy Multiviewer. The Air Pack product suite can be purchased at a lower cost than buying the products individually.
Multiviewing I/O
A single Cinegy Multiviewer instance can input, monitor, analyse and display hundreds of traditional or IP-based incoming feeds on one or multiple screens, and output in a range of IP streaming formats. In the latest version, attention to GPU acceleration capabilities has reduced server CPU load and increased scalability, enhancing sustainability at the same time. Cinegy Multiviewer has proven useful for professional NDI monitoring, due to its NDI source tolerance mode.
Cinegy Multiviewer performs in local and remote operations. It can be massively scaled from a few to hundreds of channels, while remaining supported in a cloud or hosted service environment. Its customizable interface simplifies management by representing each channel input along with a set of preview components and indicators. It allows an operator to monitor as many channels as needed, indicating the real-time status of each channel and a view of the resulting video from any station in the network, anywhere in the world.
Cinegy Multiviwer
For the Multiviewer’s output, an operator can design multi-layout views of sources using the integrated layout designer, and then render all of these directly to a standard screen or even recompress and stream them back to the network.
Automated Subtitling
Cinegy also launched the addition of an AI powered automatic subtitling feature into the existing Cinegy Subtitling Service. This service inserts the required subtitle information into an incoming IP stream, matching the existing broadcast standards. It can transcribe spoken language into DVB or teletext subtitles in real-time and embed them into the source IP stream, either live or based on a subtitle file. Subtitling has been part of the regular Cinegy workflow already, and is implemented as a side-car to the main Cinegy Air service.
Now, the Service incorporates OpenAI functionality as a free-of-charge update to existing users of the Air Ultimate bundle. The new feature is also available as a standalone product (still called Cinegy Subtitling) through the use of the Open API specification. In this case it runs without an internet connection on consumer GPUs, and works with third-party systems, which means it can be used more widely than in the Cinegy Air workflow. It is able to transcribe nearly 100 languages, although its fastest, most accurate performance is achieved with English. www.cinegy.com
