The 8 a.m. Sunday Chyron press breakfast traditionally starts off the week of NAB press conferences. Now British-owned, the company originated in Melville, Long Island, decades ago. The name became a standard term in the broadcast industry—something like Band-Aid or Kleenex—to define a character generator, as the company built some of the very first commercially available ones.

For the first time, Chyron announced that its entire line of character generators, graphics play-out systems, and channel branding gear would be SD/HD switchable. That’s good news for those starting out with the new entry-level HX200 CG; users can begin at a lower tab, then add the HD boardset when the need arises.

The new Channel Box, a “channel branding solution in a box,” reflects the dynamics and increasingly tight economic factors now in play in the broadcast industry. While an artist or talented CG type can create the original graphical layouts, the device sports a newly designed, simple, clean, drag-and-drop GUI. Now, regardless of staff change-over, any operator—even that pimply kid intern, can run the system—changing the graphics via the simple-to-use Windows-style drag-and-drop interface. There’s more: The same GUI will show a neat mini-version of how the image will appear married to the final broadcast video, and even allows control over the final play-out to air.

Lyric Pro is the big new product introduction. Following a trend seen in other intros at the show, such as a new software upgrade’s capability from Pixel Power, the Lyric Pro automates how the final graphics interact over the live video being broadcast. The techs in the master control suite only have to trigger the next series of lower-thirds, scores, etc., and the system itself deals with differences such as moving between two lines of text and three, or when a graphic is inserted after a text roll. Everything moves smoothly on and off, nudging the graphics out of the way in whatever way you decide. Keeps the poor fellow at the controls from going batty after eight hours of triggering, keying, fading, and punching buttons at the behest of the TD.

During the Q&A, we learned that Chyron had been awarded an important patent recently, with two pending. Turns out that the company controls any technology that enables the integration of live television graphics data with a broad range of interactive media platforms and consumer electronics devices. That could be a major win for the small company. Chyron President and C.E.O.Michael Wellesley-Wesley said, “In technical terms, this work enables the generation of realtime triggers and metadata from graphics inserted into live programming, such as News, Sports, and Gameshows. These triggers and metadata can then be used across a wide range of media platforms to add interactivity and to dynamically re-version and re-purpose graphics with a workflow that fits seamlessly into existing live television control room environments. This makes Chyron uniquely suited to offer our existing broadcast customers a new level of integration between these new media devices and traditional broadcast television production.”

Thus any of the major companies making content to go over cell phones, stream to PDAs, etc., will have to come to terms with Chyron if they need to manipulate that video to make it fit any of the new aspect ratios, etc.

Guess that’s something that comes along if, like Chyron, you’ve worked long and diligently in the industry and made sure to file some patents along the way.