Lakeland Public Television installs Cinegy software suite

Booth SL11116, NAB 2016, 18 – 21 April 2016 – Cinegy, which develops and produces software technology for digital video processing, asset management, video compression and automation and playout today announced that Lakeland Public TV (LPTV), a PBS affiliate serving northern and central Minnesota, has installed Cinegy software modules to replace its aging Avid FastBreak Automation hardware-based, playout, channel branding, and EAS system.

PBS as an organization is transitioning to file-based content delivery to member stations. LPTV wanted a system that tracked with the PBS initiative, and investigated a number of alternative hardware- and software-based solutions. However, in the end, LPTV turned to Cinegy and its IP-based, software-defined television concept for the complete package.

LPTV CEO and Director of Engineering Bill Sanford said, “We wanted to increase efficiency, cut costs, and take full advantage of IP-based infrastructures. The Cinegy software suite gives us the power and flexibility to do this seamlessly. Cinegy provides wonderful capabilities at a fraction of the cost of older broadcast hardware. No other software-based solution we looked at was as complete. They really covered all the bases.”

LPTV takes content from PBS’s IP-over-satellite file store with its Myers ProTrack broadcast management system, which centralizes content metadata and facilitates multiple distribution workflows. ProTrack now moves the content to Cinegy Air playout storage via an FTP command generated by ProTrack.

Using native IP or baseband ingest support inside Cinegy Capture for recording, and Cinegy Air for playout, the upgraded LPTV system can record and playout satellite downlinks directly, without SDI, and output in both IP and SDI for monitoring and broadcast. 

LPTV’s Sanford adds, “Because Cinegy uses standards based IT hardware and streaming IP technologies, the installation infrastructure is not only greatly simplified, but enables many new capabilities to be deployed.”

Once a file is recorded, Cinegy Player PRO rapidly QC’s the material, performs closed caption checks, and informs the ProTrack system that material has been created and QC’d.

LPTV also uses Cinegy Traffic Gateway to ingest and parse SMPTE standard BXF playlist messages; search for identified media in storage that matches the traffic request; reports when media is missing; and creates a dummy placeholder for program items that are not yet available in storage.

Taking the resulting playlist from Traffic Gateway, Cinegy Air Control gives operators an easy, sequenced view of what is playing out and coming up on each Cinegy Air PRO playout engine. Operators can spot-check multiple channels on the same automation panel without tying up a playout port, and even fine-tune timings live from the playlist.

Cinegy Managing Director Daniella Weigner said, “We are delighted that LPTV is one of the latest broadcasters worldwide to use our software suite to harness the power of IP and reap the multiple benefits of software-defined television.”