The Public Radio and Television Service of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BHRT) deployed the Cinegy suite of products during a major digitisation project that took place in 2016, a project that included a transition to tapeless production. In the intervening years, Cinegy has helped BHRT keep its system up to date, resulting in a continuously improving workflow that still runs without a hitch nearly a decade later.
Cinegy quickly allowed BHRT to meet the daily production requirements of two 24/7 public television broadcasters, including two news departments. From the technical side, BHRT feels the Cinegy solution is very stable and easy to manage, which offers additional advantages when it comes to the daily work of the team.
“During our years of using the Cinegy system, we have had excellent cooperation and understanding with the Cinegy Support and Development team, as well as with Sales managers and Owners,” said Muhamed Žerić, CTO at BHRT. “We feel very close to the entire Cinegy team, so much so that we can say we work as a single entity. And as Cinegy improved its products, BHRT also improved its production work processes.”
Who is BHRT?
An active member of the EBU, BHRT is the independent state public service broadcaster of Bosnia and Herzegovina. BHRT produces and broadcasts domestic and international radio and television programs, alongside multimedia content that is broadcast to a very culturally diverse population using the country’s three national languages. Broadcasts are delivered terrestrial and on cable via its television channel BHT1, its public radio service (BH Radio 1), and on its official website www.bhrt.ba.
Programmes from the public service broadcaster are available 24 hours a day and reach more than 90% of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina over a terrestrial signal.
What Cinegy products were chosen ?
BHRT installed a Cinegy production system that includes news production capabilities, as well as a 24/7 playout system for two public service broadcasters.
The Cinegy products deployed by BHRT include:
Cinegy Desktop, allowing up to 60 concurrent journalists to collaborate on projects wherever they may be. Cinegy Desktop provides secure access to the Cinegy Archive database from anywhere, at any time over a standard computer or laptop running Windows or Mac OS, and a regular Internet connection. Using the Cinegy Desktop browser-based interface, clips can be searched, browsed, selected and even edited. Users can participate in a collaborative workflow even when they are based in different locations.
Cinegy Air, supporting almost 10 multi-channel playout servers, simplifies the challenge of running many channels by providing BHRT with flexibly configurable features in a single unit located in either local, physical hardware, a virtual machine or the cloud. Cinegy Air can be configured to deliver H.264 and HEVC streaming output along with SDI and SMPTE-2110, as well as AC-3 encoding, optional Emergency Alert System, Nielsen watermarking and Cinegy Title channel branding. All forming one integrated software solution that is flexible and scalable to meet current and future requirements.
Cinegy Capture PRO, a professional multi-channel, multi-format real-time ingest engine, reliably records and makes accessible real-time content streams for BHRT. Cinegy Capture PRO enables operators to work with a rich client interface running anywhere on the network, controlling dedicated ingest software services, which simultaneously generate all versions needed for archive, editing and remote working.
Cinegy Archive acts as the secure hub that allows BHRT to control and share its media asset metadata throughout its facility, providing centralised management of content and acting as the centerpiece of its desktop asset management systems.
Cinegy also provided transcoding software alongside Cinegy Prompter, that runs on any commodity or tablet Windows-based PC and is compatible with many standard teleprompter hardware devices available on the market.
Cinegy fully satisfied the technical requirements of BHRT at the bidding stage already in relation to the production system. The Cinegy suite of products blends all features of news production in a collaborative production environment without the need to integrate any add-ons such as MOS Gateway.
Cinegy also offers BHRT a stable 24/7 playout system that includes all the tools necessary to a high level broadcaster, such as multi-channel playout control, quick editing (cut&play) and a graphics layer contained within the same playout control application.
BHRT was also delighted with features such as manual or automated file ingest and outgest and the availability of a simple control application for multi-channel live recording.
What results were delivered?
BHRT noted a significantly improved and accelerated program production process. Cinegy has simplified workflows and reduced the time required for program preparation and editing.
Cinegy also introduced new and important processes within the monitoring function and the supervision of program production. Cinegy also integrated certain workflows, thereby reducing the number of production staff needed in-house.
The purchase of the Cinegy suite of products fundamentally supported BHRT’s business strategy when it come to the process of digital transformation of its business and production.
Future goals?
“BHRT has plans for regular system upgrades in connection with our internal needs and expansion plans and these include capture and playout for new studios, transcoding for multimedia and web purposes, and loudness normalisation,” said Žerić. “These expansions are ongoing, arising as they are needed and benefiting from our many years of experience using the Cinegy system. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Cinegy.”