Chyron Corporation

American video technology corporation

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 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. By the 1980s, Chyron had captured a 70% market share in its field. 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.

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.

"Lower third" television graphics created by character generators are sometimes generically called chyrons (a form of genericized trademark) regardless of who made them.