Newly Joined ChryonHego Unveils New Path at NAB
If you’re looking for a sign that the sports production community is becoming a more global entity, look no further than the merger between Chyron and Hego that was announced three weeks ago.
During an NAB Show press conference on Sunday morning, executives from both companies spoke about the new brand going of ChyronHego going forward once the deal becomes official, as it is expected to following a shareholder vote in May.
“I am massively enthusiastic about the prospect of the combined companies,” says Michael Wellesley-Wesley, who will be CEO of ChyronHego. “It seems like we’ve been working together for about six months, not just six weeks. I think with what you see in what we’ve accomplished with product integration and with marketing steps, you’ll be impressed as well.”
The merger creates the second largest graphics company on the planet. Hego is a leader in graphics technology in Europe – particularly in sports – and Chyron does about 75% of its sales in North America.
“It’s quite interesting that we’ve been around the 70’s as well and it took 40 years for our roads to combine, but in many ways our companies are the same,” says Johan Apel, the current CEO of Hego, will become president and chief operating officer of ChyronHego. “It’s all about technology, it’s all about innovation.”
ChryonHego will be showing off its new brand and latest product line this week at booth SL1010 at Las Vegas Convention Center.
New Product Launches
In addition to the new name and brand, ChyronHego is unveiling a collection of new products at NAB Show.
The company will demonstrate the all-new Graffiti broadcast graphics platform. Product specialists at ChyronHego’s booth will highlight two high-performance models: Graffiti SDI, a 1-RU system fully loaded with the award-winning Lyric PRO graphics creation software, and Graffiti SDI Flex, a portable backpack-ready character generator boasting all the features of Graffiti SDI. Ideal for live news, sports, entertainment, and OB productions, both models provide broadcasters with a professional cost-effective solution for incorporating high-end graphics into live broadcasts.
ChyronHego also announced the launch of Mosaic, a high-performance, 1080p-capable broadcast graphics platform for use in traditional or automated production workflows. Built on the latest Intel® and NVIDIA architecture, Mosaic’s powerful graphics engine is ideal for live news, sports, entertainment, and OB productions.
Mosaic fits easily within existing workflows or ChyronHego’s streamlined end-to-end BlueNet solution, either as a stand-alone character generator for live operation or as a primary graphics engine in automated environments, when integrated with ChyronHego’s CAMIO graphics asset management server.
The new company has also launched CAMIO-DR, a new data recovery system designed for the CAMIO3 graphics asset management server. The system, now available and shipping, will allow broadcasters to protect valuable graphics assets against potential hardware failures and achieve a smooth on-air recovery.
“Live programming requires a high level of system availability with the ability to recover critical data quickly and easily,” said Jim Martinolich, vice president of integration technology at ChyronHego in a company release. “A hardware failure or other data corruption can cause a severe disruption to operations. CAMIO-DR joins the acclaimed CAMIO product line as a lower-cost warm standby solution for reliable data and workflow protection.”
CAMIO-DR can be remotely located for various disaster recovery scenarios. The system performs regularly scheduled backups of the primary CAMIO’s assets and databases, and the syncing process can be performed in the background during normal CAMIO operation.
Deal With The Dutch
ChyronHego will partner with the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL) to provide real-time digital sports data for the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2’s live sporting broadcasts. The four-year deal – which will carry through the 2016-17 season- will utilize ChyronHego’s TRACAB system to collect player and ball statistics.
ChyronHego has already formed a consortium with Opta Sport with whom they have worked on similar joint projects internationally. Opta Sport will be supplying match-specific statistics such as goals, assists, and throw-ins, etc. Hego will be collecting player/ball-specific data such as positional data, distance covered, and speeds.
In addition to supplying data to the league, the agreement also gives ChyronHego and Opta the rights to market the official Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 data to the media, betting agencies, clubs, and league associations.