Cinegy today announced that ABS BROADCAST, one of the largest independently owned playout and television service providers in Europe, has installed Cinegy Air PRO, Cinegy’s latest real-time playout server and multi-channel broadcast automation software.
   

ABS BROADCAST Head of Technology and Engineering Mukund Patel said, “We offer extensive broadcast channel management and delivery services, but the heart of our business is playout. The growing demand for our playout services worldwide meant that we simply couldn’t continue buying and maintaining racks upon racks of servers. There had to be a better way, which has now clearly emerged as an IP-based approach.”

Cinegy, as a provider of totally IP-based solutions, would seem to be a logical place to start asking questions and seeking answers, but Patel was not yet necessarily ready to jump wholesale into IP playout.

Patel said, “I knew we needed to think about the future and who we were going to partner with. At IBC in recent years, I saw Cinegy everywhere. I spoke to quite a few people in the industry about them, including existing users of their technology, and the response I invariably got was, ‘There are very clever people doing very clever things at Cinegy’, but I still wasn’t quite convinced because they worked very differently to the way we had traditionally worked.”

However, Patel soon realised that IP-based playout was the way forward. According to Patel, “After lots of discussion and diligent study, it became abundantly clear that the future is IP and we needed to embrace it. Cinegy is an experienced, visionary company in that world, which means it is a company we felt confident in working with to help us to achieve our vision.”

To address growing channel playout requirements, ABS BROADCAST installed Cinegy Air PRO, Cinegy Multiviewer, Cinegy Archive, Cinegy Studio PRO, and, for graphics, Cinegy Type. All of the modules are now seamlessly integrated with ABS BROADCAST’s ‘ABSolute Delivery Platform’.

“In addition to vastly shrinking our power consumption and the amount of rack space required, we now play out multiple channels for an extremely happy customer using a single RJ45 cable,” said Patel. “Broadcasters, even electricians, to whom I’ve shown the system can scarcely believe it.”

Cinegy Managing Director and co-founder Jan Weigner said, “ABS BROADCAST has a deserved reputation for excellence and forward thinking.

“In an IP age, to make a difference to your clients you have to be willing to make an educated advance into new technology that will best serve their needs. We have, and continue to, work very closely with ABS BROADCAST to provide the IP software and support they need to grow their business. It’s an excellent partnership that we only seeing growing with our respective businesses in the future.”