The Chyron Corporation, formerly ChyronHego Corporation, headquartered in Melville, New York, is a company that specializes in broadcast graphics creation, playout, and real-time data visualization for live television, news, weather, and sports production. Chyron's graphics offerings include hosted services for graphics creation and order management, on-air graphics systems, channel branding, weather graphics, graphics asset management, clip servers, social media and second screen applications, touchscreen graphics, telestration, virtual graphics, and player tracking.
The company was founded in 1966 as Systems Resources Corporation. In its early days it was renamed "Chiron" after the centaur Chiron in Greek mythology. In the 1970s it pioneered the development of broadcast titling and graphics systems. Use of its graphics generators[1] by the major New York City–based US television networks ABC, NBC, and eventually CBS, integrated text and graphics into news and sports coverage on broadcast television and later on cable TV.[2]
By the 1980s, Chyron had captured a 70% market share in its field. In it was the most profitable company on Long Island. In 1983 it achieved a market capitalization of $112 million, high at the time for a small high-tech firm before the age of dot-com and the Internet.[3]
Corporate history
Chyron's graphics generator technology was originated by Systems Resources Corporation, founded in 1966 by Francis Mechner and engineer Eugene Leonard as equal partners and sole directors and shareholders. Mechner had just sold his educational technology company Basic Systems, Inc. to Xerox Corporation; and Leonard had sold Digitronics Corporation, of which he was president. Mechner and Leonard previously worked together in the late 1950s at Schering Corporation, creating a computerized data collection and analysis system for its behavioral psychopharmacology laboratory.
Mechner provided the capital for Systems Resources Corporation's first five years of operation and Leonard provided his engineering expertise. Between 1966 and 1972, the company developed several innovative digital technology-based products, including a digital graphics generator for displaying letters on a television screen, which it called "Chiron" after the centaur Chiron in Greek mythology.[4] The device controlled the edging of the displayed characters in a manner that took background variables into account.
In 1972, the company hired Joseph L. Scheuer as its vice president of operations (he was an engineer at Leonard's Digitronics). From 1971 to 1978, Eugene Leonard was the company's president, and also directed engineering. The Chiron I, Chiron II and Chiron III character generator families were developed during this time, with conceptual design entirely by Leonard.
In 1975, Systems Resources Corporation merged with Computer Exchange, a used-computer brokerage owned by engineer Leon Weissman,[3] who had also worked for Leonard at Digitronics (Director of Engineering, 1962–1964). Weissman's company had cash, but its business was in a slump. The merger provided SRC with funding beyond Mechner's contributions. The merged company, Chiron, was located in Plainview, New York, only a few miles from its present Melville location.
Leon Weissman placed emphasis on sales and field service, starting the company on a decade of increasingly profitable operations. Differences emerged between Leonard and Weissman with the former wanting to use more of the profits earned for engineering development of even more sophisticated products. Weissman was more cautious about the early introduction of new products, wanting to accumulate working capital and eventually make some distributions to shareholders. These differences led to the departure of Eugene Leonard from the company in 1978. Joseph Scheuer became president and Leon Weissman became chairman and CEO.[5]
In 1983, Leon Weissman turned over his positions as chairman and CEO to Alfred O.P. Leubert.[6] The company continued profitably for some years. Acquisitions were made in order to increase sales. Acquiring companies such as CMX Editing Systems and Aurora Systems did not prove to be profitable in the long run; so much so that in 1991 the company filed for bankruptcy and reorganization.[7] In 1995, new owners took control of the company and appointed Michael I. Wellesley-Wesly as chairman and CEO.[7]
In the 1990s and 2000s, Chyron Corporation continued being successful in its core business, but profitability and stock market success never returned to the glory days of the early 1980s.
In May 2013, Chyron Corporation merged with Sweden-based company Hego AB and its subsidiaries (collectively, "Hego Group"), a leading provider of graphics and data visualization solutions for TV and sports. The combined company was rebranded as ChyronHego and is headquartered in Melville, New York, with offices in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
In 2015, the private equity firm Vector Capital bought ChyronHego for $120 million. The stock of the company, which previously traded on the NASDAQ Global Market under the symbol CHYR, was delisted.[8]
In February 2021, ChyronHego announced that the company will return to its former name Chyron, relegating Hego and Tracab to "sub-brands".[9][10]
Product development and history
Systems Resources Corporation began manufacturing dot-matrix (5×7) character generators (CG) for airport arrival and departure time displays. It also began manufacturing a clean-looking fixed-font (ROM-based) CG sold as the Chiron I. It featured the ability to record and retrieve lower thirds and full page text displays for news departments of TV stations as an alternative to art cards, slides or scrolling black felt.
The company built its own multi-track magnetic storage device, the VidiLoop, based on a two-foot loop of computer tape in a thick clear plastic housing. On the Chiron I, it was used solely for title storage. It was also used on a few early Chiron IIs, but due to increased storage requirements it was replaced by Shugart SA901 8" floppy drives as soon as they were available.
The name Chiron was already registered in California, so by changing them to a Y in the 1970s they were able to keep the familiar-sounding name and became initially Chyron Telesystems and, later still, Chyron Corporation, capitalizing on the product's name recognition.
The Chiron II featured up to six loadable fonts (typefaces) with, for the time, very high video resolution. The display circuits were running so fast (27 ns) that the fastest ICs available were used and had to be hand selected during manufacture as not all samples were up to par.
It was also the company's first unit to incorporate a 16-bit mini-computer known as the DataMate-70. That processor's code base was used in the Chiron IV and 4100 series systems, which were the workhorses of the mobile sports graphics industry from the late 1970s through most of the 1980s. Programs and fonts were loaded from loop or disk into computer style magnetic core memory. As the font data access needed to be done more quickly than a single core memory could achieve, four core boards were used in parallel to provide faster access. It was also the first CG that had non-monospaced fonts with adjustable inter-row and inter-character spacing.
All of that capability came at a cost too dear for many small market TV stations, and so a spin-off of a project for NBC became the Chiron III (later IIIB); a less capable system that was adequate for many TV news departments was developed and sold. It became the first mobile graphics systems of ABC Sports under Roone Arledge. It was he who pushed the increased use of graphics in sports to what it is today—a significant portion of live sports entertainment. The III's success provided the impetus for the Chiron IV, which was a modernized and reduced-package-size Chiron II suitable for mobile use. It quickly replaced the Chiron IIIs as the dominant sports graphics system. In 1989, Chyron released the iNFiNiT!, with the related Max!, and Maxine! Coming later in the 90s.
Chyron grew into the leading hardware manufacturer and software designer of 2D and 3D broadcast character generators in North America.
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984, Mattel sold its video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors, eventually becoming INTV Corporation. Game development ran from 1978 to 1990, when the Intellivision was discontinued. From 1980 to 1983, more than 3.75 million consoles were sold. As per Intellivision Entertainment the final tally through 1990 is somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million consoles sold.
PostScript is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it can be used for many other purposes as well. PostScript was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984. The most recent version, PostScript 3, was released in 1997.
The RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer, later marketed as the Tandy Color Computer and nicknamed the CoCo, is a line of home computers developed and sold by Tandy Corporation. Despite sharing a name with the earlier TRS-80, the Color Computer is a completely different, incompatible system and a radical departure in design and compatibility with its Motorola 6809E processor rather than the Zilog Z80 earlier models were built around.
Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display and printing hardware, vector data models and file formats, as well as the software based on these data models. Vector graphics is an alternative to raster or bitmap graphics, with each having advantages and disadvantages in specific situations.
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 with the Atari 400 and Atari 800. As the first home computer architecture with coprocessors, it has graphics and sound more advanced than most of its contemporaries. Video games were a major appeal, and first-person space combat simulator Star Raiders is considered the platform's killer app. The "Atari 8-bit family" label was not contemporaneous. Atari, Inc., used the term "Atari 800 [or 400] home computer system", often combining the model names into "Atari 400/800" or "Atari home computers".
NAPLPS is a graphics language for use originally with videotex and teletext services. NAPLPS was developed from the Telidon system developed in Canada, with a small number of additions from AT&T Corporation. The basics of NAPLPS were later used as the basis for several other microcomputer-based graphics systems.
A framebuffer is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor.
An on-screen display (OSD) is an image superimposed on a screen picture, commonly used by modern television sets, VCRs, and DVD players to display information such as volume, channel, and time.
A character generator, often abbreviated as CG, is a device or software that produces static or animated text for keying into a video stream. Modern character generators are computer-based, and they can generate graphics as well as text.
In the television industry, a lower third is a graphic overlay placed in the title-safe lower area of the screen, though not necessarily the entire lower third of it, as the name suggests.
The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, or Technology and Engineering Emmys, are one of two sets of Emmy Awards that are presented for outstanding achievement in engineering development in the television industry. The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), while the separate Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards are given by its sister organization the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS).
Chiron is a famous centaur from Greek mythology.
A video display controller or VDC is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computing or game system. Some VDCs also generate an audio signal, but that is not their main function.
The Computer Originated World (COW) was the method of creating the BBC1 symbol that was used between 18 February 1985 and 16 February 1991. It was later used by the international, commercial television service BBC World Service Television from its launch until 26 January 1995.
CBS Laboratories or CBS Labs was the technology research and development organization of the CBS television network. Innovations developed at the labs included many groundbreaking broadcast, industrial, military, and consumer technologies.
Francis Mechner is an American research psychologist best known for having developed and introduced a formal symbolic language for the codification and notation of behavioral contingencies. He has published articles about the language's applications in economics, finance, education, environment, business management, biology, clinical practice, and law. Mechner is also known for a variety of contributions to instructional technology and basic research in the field of learning.
The Mullard SAA5050 was a character generator chip for implementing the Teletext character set.
The 58th Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards was held on January 8, 2007. The National Television Academy announced the winners at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. DIRECTV's Eddy Hartenstein received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his role in the company's becoming a global provider of digital television.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
