Cinegy Air is widely recognized as the industry’s highly effective playout server and broadcast automation solution
When memory costs are soaring, this is a real, practical benefit
The big claims for software-defined architectures and the cloud have been around the ability to scale and flex easily
Cinegy GmbH, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, will use its presence at IBC2026 (stand 7.A01, Amsterdam RAI, 11 – 14 September) to show how its decades of experience is delivering against the real challenges and opportunities of today’s media environment. Its software delivers unrivalled performance and agility, vital when hardware costs have escalated exponentially.
Cinegy Air is widely recognized as the industry’s highly effective playout server and broadcast automation solution. At IBC, Cinegy will focus on its ability to run its core back-end functionality in a Docker environment on Linux. This results in remarkable efficiency, calling for a much smaller processor footprint and only needing a quarter to an eighth of the RAM which a similar Windows implementation would need.
When memory costs are soaring, this is a real, practical benefit. It means that users can achieve a great deal more with the hardware assets they already have, and if they are migrating to the cloud, ensures they do so with a minimum of costs.
“We see newcomers to the server and playout market claiming that ‘breaking the one channel to one server’ concept is novel,” said Jan Weigner, CTO and founder of Cinegy. “We have been using virtualization and other methods to pack many more channels into small footprints for over 15 years. What we will showcase at IBC this year is how users are now free to switch to Linux backend-based operations to get the absolute maximum performance, without the operators even noticing that anything has changed. Of course, Docker-based channel deployment brings many other advantages as well: instant scalability, fast migration and total channel templatization.”
The big claims for software-defined architectures and the cloud have been around the ability to scale and flex easily, yet for many it remains the biggest pain point. Cinegy and its Linux-based engine architecture really delivers on scalability, while providing extremely high resilience through sandboxed Docker deployment. It allows users to spin up fully configured instances of software – complete broadcast channels, in other words – literally in seconds.
“Our clients tell us that Cinegy Air has all the playout and server functionality that they could ever need,” Weigner said. “We can deliver against any requirement, so now our efforts are more and more focused on efficiency and ease of deployment. Efficiency has always been a driver, but with today’s challenges around the costs of processors, memory and storage, it is more critical than ever. That is why we are inviting the IBC community to see how we are delivering.”
Alongside the focus on Cinegy Air, the IBC stand will see presentations on other key products, including Cinegy Desktop, a cross-platform, local and cloud-based, real-time production system used for sports, news, reality TV or anything requiring instant turn-around. Being connected to the Cinegy local or cloud-based Media Asset Management system it can provide instant access to unlimited channels of live camera or video feeds while they are being recorded or uploaded. This is another proposed benefit of software-based systems – the ability to work from anywhere – but again it has proven to be much tougher in practice. Cinegy Desktop, by adopting a zero-trust and zero-install client architecture, provides safe and secure access over any Internet connection, without the need for an administrator to perform installation or device management.
“By IBC next year we will be well into the celebrations of 25 years of Cinegy,” Weigner added. “We were pioneers of software-defined media, and we survived by understanding the real issues facing the industry and developing solutions that resonated with our users. Today that means maximizing existing hardware assets and minimizing cloud cost, while increasing services and maintaining quality. That is the unique proposition we are offering this year’s IBC visitors.”
To help understand the challenges and solutions of well-defined software architectures, and to share experiences, the Cinegy stand at IBC will feature a presentation area, the Cinegy Studio, which will offer a series of presentations and debates throughout the show.