ChyTV Author digital signage software works hand in hand with ChyTV Tools project management software. A ChyTV project is a collection of pages and a schedule, along with supporting digital display content such as animations, logos, video clips, text files, etc.  ChyTV Tools manages and coordinates all pages and supporting assets and scheduling.  Our electronic signage solutions also facilitate configuration and control of multiple ChyTV devices on the network and content transfer to them.

Content Delivery

There are two primary methods for delivering content to a ChyTV graphic display board.

For most Local Area Network (LAN) configurations, the ChyTV Tools application is used to ‘push’ the content to the ChyTV device(s) directly via their IP address.  This is appropriate when all devices and the authoring station running ChyTV Tools are on the same subnet.  ChyTV Tools accepts a list of IP addresses of the various ChyTV devices on the network and can connect to each of them directly to push a ChyTV project for playout.    Once the player has been updated, it will run on its own as a playout appliance and does not require a persistent connection to the authoring station or any other computer or server.  Our electronic signage solutions provide a “store and forward” implementation in which all content is stored on the device.  ChyTV Tools can also push the same content to multiple graphic display boards simultaneously.  It should be noted that even when ChyTV Tools is run remotely on a different subnet, it is still possible to directly access the ChyTV devices via networking techniques such as “port forwarding.”

For Wide Area Network (WAN) deployments, when multiple devices are in multiple remote locations and are on different subnets, a content hosting and delivery service called ChyTV.net may be used. ChyTV.net is a method for server based content hosting and delivery. It is appropriate for situations when there are many remote devices on a Wide Area Network to be administered through a single central interface. Through ChyTV.net, ChyTV devices such as the HD 100, HD 150, HD-mini, etc. reach out through the local firewall at regular intervals to the ChyTV.net server and collect their appropriate content and scheduling. Using the ChyTV.net Web interface, an administrator can log in to their account to administer assignment and distribution of content to any ChyTV graphics display boards on their network. A ChyTV ‘Project’ is a collection of digital display content and scheduling information. A ChyTV.net ‘Group’ is a collection of ChyTV devices that are to receive the same Project. Through the ChyTV.net interface, the administrator can create groups, add or remove ChyTV devices to and from the Groups, and upload and assign Projects to the Groups. There are also features in our electronic signage solutions to allow assignment of ‘Real Time Data’ such as weather, sports scores, news headlines, etc., as well as being able to collect ‘Proof of Play’ logs from the individual devices.

Note that with ChyTV.net, the ChyTV Tools and ChyTV Author digital signage software is still used to create and manage the digital display projects.  However rather than pushing the content directly to the ChyTV devices, the project is uploaded to the ChyTV.net account through the Web interface and is assigned to a group.

AXIS

AXIS is hosted entirely on the internet and allows you to create, collaborate on and distribute highly engaging content to multiple output formats and systems.  The new Flash output format means you can create animations and stills in AXIS to fulfill the digital display content and save them for the web.  Axis stills and clips can be delivered to any standard server where they can be retrieved and displayed by the ChyTV devices.  The AXIS interface is hosted at Chyron.  The content server can be hosted at Chyron (in the case of ChyTV.net, to be discussed later) or by the customer.Requiring no hardware, technical setup or administration management, AXIS is designed for operational and technical simplicity and low operational cost. The individual products are aimed at providing specific graphics types with relevant resources, thus removing the operational complexity of more generic systems.

Our electronic signage solutions offer the combination of Axis and ChyTV.net enables easy management of wide-reaching campaigns with many devices on the network, but with the ability to also add local information custom to each location. The ease of use of Axis permits non-skilled end-users to log into an account and add their own messaging based on pre-built templates.