CHALLENGE
London-based ABS BROADCAST is one of the largest independently owned playout and television facilities companies in Europe and manages the transmission and technical requirements of many major television channels worldwide.

ABS BROADCAST offers extensive broadcast channel management and delivery services, but the heart of its business is playout. Today, approximately 50 channels are using ABS Broadcast services. The growing demand for playout services worldwide meant that ABS BROADCAST couldn’t continue buying and maintaining expensive and sizable servers. There had to be a better way, which emerged with the arrival of the IP-based approach offered by Cinegy GmbH.

“IP is the future and we have embraced it. Cinegy is an experienced, visionary company in that world, and we are totally confident in working with them to achieve our vision.” Mukund Patel, ABS BROADCAST Head of Technology and Engineering

SOLUTION
To address growing channel playout requirements, ABS BROADCAST installed the Cinegy Air PRO Bundles that includes CG solution Cinegy Type; Cinegy Multiviewer for monitoring; Cinegy Archive a MAM solution; and Cinegy Studio PRO. All of the software tools are now seamlessly integrated with ABS’s ‘Absolute Delivery Platform’.

By using Cinegy, ABS BROADCAST has vastly reduced its power requirements and eliminated most of the high-maintenance technology in its rack room because it’s no longer needed. ABS can now play out multiple channels using a single RJ45 cable.

ARCHIVE – Cinegy Archive enables local and remote real-time collaboration that enables ABS BROADCAST staff to work on video material in real-time, even while it is still being ingested. With advanced logging and metadata accumulation over the entire lifecycle of the media, assets become easily searchable and reusable, therefore saving time and money. Five Cinegy Desktop clients are being used with Cinegy Archive and Cinegy Convert, with the Cinegy MAM plugin for asset management. Around 100 TB of media is being stored and used the Cinegy Archive in ABS BROADCAST. Cinegy Convert is a highly flexible, scalable and interactive software solution, used for converting content into different formats. Working in the integrated mode, Cinegy Convert automates such important tasks as media import, media export, additional qualities creation, etc.

PLAYOUT – Cinegy Air PRO is used to control the multiple channels playing to air, and to plan schedules, programming, and commercial blocks offline. It is fully integrated with Cinegy Archive using media, metadata, placeholders, and graphics elements in the playout schedule. It was chosen to run on 10 new channels and is planned to be used on every new channel in the future. Cinegy Type is a softwarebased CG and branding option available for extending Cinegy Air PRO. It enables ABS BROADCAST to add multiple layers of automation control, template based titles, logos, animated graphics, and more. Customer playlists are automatically processed using Cinegy Traffic Gateway PRO.

IP TOOLS – Cinegy Multiviewer runs on the ABS BROADCAST as a service to monitor and analyse content being transferred over IP streams, raising alerts for any signal problems. It is used to monitor 32 channels broadcasting from the facilities. Among them four channels run on Cinegy and all others on a 3rd party solution.

SUCCESS
With the addition of Cinegy, ABS BROADCAST provides the only fully integrated playout and broadcast management services in its market. Utilising its well-known expertise with cloud based technologies, ABS BROADCAST offer channels with a seamless, single dashboard, real-time link between its playlist compilation and scheduling management.

About ABS BROADCAST
ABS BROADCAST is one of the largest independently owned playout and television facilities companies in Europe. The home of the Absolute Delivery Platform, ABS manages the transmission and technical requirement of many major television channels globally. The recent launch of its new state-of-the art Media Asset Management facility, built around a factory environment for analogue, SD and HD tape digitisation and management, has secured the company’s position as one of the largest mass digitisation centres in Europe, capable of handling hundreds of thousands of hours of video and associated files on behalf of content owners.