Serenity Playout: Developing a new broadcast product line

While Dorsunator keeps us busy enough here at Pragbits, we also started developing a completely new product line targeting the broadcast industry. These are pretty exciting times for us! Here is what we have been working on lately:

Serenity Playout is a virtualized broadcast playout system. If you follow the latest broadcast terminology, you may have heard the term “channel in a box”. This refers to simply the fact that one playout channel (TV, usually) served by one self-contained server system. Of course, with today’s virtualization technologies, we have to utilize virtual machines for these tasks as much as we can. The system is designed to run in virtualized environment, meaning that it runs in virtual host servers and by design, one playout channel is served by one virtual guest server. This can make the system very flexible and scalable.

Serenity’s broadcast approach is to keep all data in the IT world with no need for SDI infrastructure. As a result, a complete and fully-featured playout system can be built on standard and well-known IT technologies. By simply dropping SDI signals and complex cabling, the architecture of the playout system will be much simpler (could we suggest saying much more… pragmatic?), scalable and flexible. We understand though that a broadcast station today cannot simply drop all its existing SDI infrastructure, and Serenity still can have optional SDI input and output ports to be compatible with current broadcasting environments.

The system can be used from single channel playout to real virtualized (also cloud-ready) playout systems. It would be very simple adding new channels to a live system, technically it is a question of adding a new Virtual server with configuration and startup options, then the system is ready to play!

This simple system architecture makes the installation straightforward and very easy as well, reducing your overall installation costs. Operation costs can also be reduced, because only one system has to be managed and not many-many subsystems.

We hope that this introductory blog entry catches your attention! As a plus, let us share with you a screenshot taken from the Serenity Playout’s desktop application:

Now back to coding. Blog to you later!