Asia Image’s Maisie Loh speaks with Cinegy’s sales manager Alexandra Malkin-Dunne at Broadcast Asia 2016 on Cinegy’s latest product offerings as well as expansion into Asia.

 

Tell us about Cinegy’s product offerings.

Cinegy is a software development company and we offer end-to-end IP software based workflow. We cover everything from ingesting, media asset management system, we have very powerful editing tool for making programmes and newsroom rundowns, all the way to play-outs, graphics and monitoring systems as well. All of our products are based fully in IP and also 4K ready right now.

Can you tell us more about your media asset management system?

We have the Cinegy Capture, which is a multi-channel, multi-format ingest tool. Cinegy archive is the heart of the media asset management system, and we have the Cinegy Desktop, which is the window into the archive, that’s where you can do your editing, edit metadata, logging, making your programmes and the news rundowns and things like that.

Is your Media Asset Management system cloud-based?

It can be, all of our systems can be virtualised. Also as well, we are moving towards cloud based offerings and Cinegy is the first automation and play-out system that’s on the Amazon marketplace right now. You can actually go to the Amazon marketplace and you can set up Cinegy Air immediately so you can play Cinegy in the cloud, right now you can go right there and run a tunnel in the cloud today.

How does Cinegy differentiate from its competitors?

We’re very much the first company that has automation in the cloud and the fact we’re IP ready and we’ve been already for many years, I would say that sets us apart as well. We’re a modular system and you can use the whole workflow and you can also use different parts of it as a standalone depending on what your system wants and we’re completely scalable up to enterprise levels. It’s a licensed based model, you can simply expand as you need and it can be done instantly from your location. You simply add more licenses from the dongle you have, it’s virtualised and has no real limits.

What’s Cinegy’s presence in Asia?

The Asia Pacific region is one of our fastest expanding regions, which we’re extremely pleased about that’s why we’re here (Broadcast Asia 2016) for the first time. We’ve expanded massively in the region and we’re working with some of the bigger companies here, we work with True Visions in Thailand, we work with Fiji Broadcasting Corporation – they run on the Cinegy workflow, they’ve done an upgrade program recently, which we’re really pleased about. We’ve also worked with Viva in Indonesia, Nation TV, and we also work with Prime Focus in India, obviously a big technological company, also working with Star World, Star Sports and we also work with World TV in New Zealand.

What’s your strategy in expanding your partnership with dealers in Asia?

We’re looking to work with new people especially new companies that have worked with the older technologies and are looking to move more towards the newer technologies such as IP, 4K and we’ve shown 8K on our booth at NAB, which is quite progressive I would say. We’re looking for people who’re possible looking for new solutions that’s feature rich, affordable, and also modular so they can upgrade existing systems for their customers and do it in a modular fashion as they do technology refreshes. New people, new ideas and working with people in the region, we’ve met some great new people here at Broadcast Asia and hopefully keep good relationships we have with our existing partners and expand into new local regions where people can get localized assistance and support when they take on the Cinegy system.

Many content providers are caught in a state of flux with the onslaught of available technology for broadcasting and production workflow, what’s your take on this change?

I’d say probably every system is very individual every customer is very individual that’s why at Cinegy we make sure our systems are customized for each customer because what might suit one may not suit another. I possibly won’t say which way it’s going or prefer, probably our Managing Director would have another opinion, and he’s usually right as well. As for ourselves, we’re trying to make what we have available to as many people as possible, we don’t want to put people in a box and say you have to do things a certain way, you have to use IP, you have to do this, so we use open architecture, we use commodity hardware, we’re not telling you what storage to use so we’re a very fluid software based solutions provider to allow you to build your channel your station however you want to. We’re not going to tell you how to do that.

I hear Cinegy is also investing in a training program in Asia?

After Broadcast Asia is over, we’re holding a five-day training here in Singapore. We’re doing it for new and existing partners and it’s a technical training, sort of a certification-training program for them. We follow a fictitious TV channel called ‘Cinegy TV’ and we basically teach our partners how to install the system, how it goes together, how to configure it and essentially how to build their own TV stations. It gives me a huge amount of technical knowledge to be able to go out there when they go out to work on their projects, that they’re fully trained in installations, how to configure it and also then to teach the TV stations engineers how to do it themselves. It’s going to be held from the 6th to the 10th of June, here in Singapore, at the Novotel in Clarke Quay.

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