Chyron Corporation (NASDAQ: CHYR) is a Melville, New York–based company that develops and manufactures on-screen graphics for the broadcast industry. The company was founded in 1966 by the late Joseph Scheuer and Eugene Leonard. The company's original name was Digitronics. They produced the first electronic scoreboard[citation needed] for the former Roosevelt Raceway harness track in Garden City, New York.
In the early 1970s, the name was changed to Systems Resources Corporation and was located in Plainview, NY only a few miles from the company's present location in Melville. They began manufacturing dot-matrix (5x7) character generators (CG) for airport arrival and departure time displays. They 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.
As the newly developed IBM and Memorex 8" floppy disk drives were not yet available for OEM purchase, the company built their 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 1 it was used solely for title storage. It was also used on a few early Chiron IIs, but due to increased storage requirements was replaced by Shugart SA901 8" floppy drives as soon as they were available.
The Chiron II was an ambitious CG project that featured up to six loadable fonts (typefaces) with, for the time, very high video resolution. The display circuits were running so fast (27ns) 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 their first unit to incorporate a 16-bit mini-computer known as the DataMate-70. That processor's code base was used in the Chyron IV and 4100 series systems, which were the work horses of the mobile sports graphics industry from the late 1970s through the 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 quicker 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 Chyron IV, which was a modernized and reduced package size Chyron II, suitable for mobile use. It quickly replaced the Chyron IIIs as the dominant sports graphics system.
Around 1975 there was an added investor who would provide much needed capital. The reorganization plan included a name change to capitalize on the product's name recognition. The name Chiron was already registered in California, so by changing the i to a y they were able to keep the familiar sounding name and became initially Chyron Telesystems and later still Chyron, Corp.
Chyron Corp. is the leading hardware manufacturer and software designer of 2D and 3D broadcast character generators in North America. Chyron’s leading character generator application is Lyric (as of 2009, Lyric Pro 7) which can produce static and animated graphics for real-time playback to air. Lyric can manage and animate 2D and 3D elements produced in other composting programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effect, Autodesk 3DS Max, etc.
Terminology
In the United States the graphics (e.g., lower thirds) generated by character generators, are typically known as Chyrons, whether the equipment is made by Chyron Corporation or not. In the United Kingdom the phrase lower third is less frequently used, but like Chyron, the name Aston is used, again making reference to a manufacturer of graphics equipment.
Financial data
Chyron Corporation trades on the American Stock Exchange under the symbol CGS.
As of 03 September 2008, Chyron is trading on NASDAQ under the symbol CHYR.
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