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Kylone
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Kylone Hospitality Headend

The channel line-up of a property, from the dish to every room, in one unit. Satellite, terrestrial, cable and IP sources in; multicast to the TVs, HLS to the hospitality middleware and to guest devices, DVB-C to a legacy coax plant out; channel lists and a programme guide any middleware can consume; protection switching the guests never see. The same engine as the Kylone Digital Headend, configured for the property: twenty to a hundred and fifty channels, a line-up that is built once, and nothing to attend to afterwards.

In Detail

What a hotel group, an integrator or a middleware vendor asks about, pillar by pillar.

Line-Up

Built once. Found by every middleware.
  • Channel lists with numbers, names, logos and categories, published as M3U for each delivery form — multicast, HTTP-TS and HLS — and as a JSON channel map, behind one manifest a middleware reads to discover what exists.
  • A seven-day programme guide in XMLTV, built from the broadcasters’ own schedules, keyed by the same channel identifiers as the lists.
  • Stable identity for every channel: number, name and service id do not change when the headend switches a channel to a protection source. The line-up on the TVs never needs rebuilding.
  • Announced on SAP for set-top boxes that discover channels by themselves.

The integration guide describes all of it as installed: nothing on the headend side needs custom work for a new middleware. Read the Hospitality Integration Guide.

Delivery

Every room, every kind of screen.
  • Multicast on the property LAN, one service per group and port, for hospitality TVs and set-top boxes.
  • HLS for HTML5 middleware, Smart TV browsers and guest devices: H.264 and AAC renditions per channel, multi-audio and subtitles carried, playlists stable across protection switches.
  • HTTP-TS unicast for players and test tools that take a transport stream URL, over plain HTTP or TLS.
  • DVB-C on a modulator card for a coax plant that is not being rewired: the same line-up on the RF side, with channel numbers.

Sources

Whatever the property receives.
  • Satellite, terrestrial and cable tuner cards, with common-interface slots for the provider-specific conditional access of pay-TV packages.
  • IP contribution from a head office or a content partner over SRT, multicast, HTTP or HLS; local files for information and promotional channels; HDMI and SDI capture for the in-house channel.
  • Radio with AM, FM and DAB+ receiver cards: stations become channels in the same line-up, with the same guide and the same delivery.
  • Scan, name, number and group in the web UI; a complete line-up of a property is an afternoon’s work.

Channel Protection · Stand-In

A channel never goes dark. And no guest ever notices.
  • Automatic backup the moment a source fails — a second feed, an information channel or a slate — with automatic return when the source is healthy again. No one at the front desk is involved.
  • Guard layers behind every backup, so one dead source can never leave a room without a picture.
  • Hitless for the TVs: the switch keeps the channel’s identity and its transport-stream tables byte for byte, so televisions, set-top boxes and HLS players keep playing without a rescan or a reload.

A hotel is judged on the night a feed fails. This makes that night uneventful.

Captions

Text on screen for international guests and accessibility rules.
  • Broadcast subtitles to text: the broadcaster’s bitmap subtitles are read at the headend and re-issued as a teletext subtitle page, selectable on every TV and available as text on HLS.
  • Speech captions: speech recognition on the audio track produces assistive captions in the spoken language, translated to English, or both — following the dialogue with a short delay, for channels that carry no subtitles at all.
  • Runs as a module on the channel, so the page reaches multicast, HLS and RF at once. See the captions module.

Assistive captions help a guest follow a programme; they are not a substitute for the broadcaster’s own subtitles where those exist.

Guest Devices

Content keys for the screens you do not own.
  • Encrypted HLS with AES-128 content keys for the hotel app and guest devices, with a key endpoint on the headend and automatic key rotation.
  • Authorisation by network and by key: the TV network of the property and the middleware’s own key are allowed, the guest Wi-Fi is not, unless the hotel app carries its key.
  • Native players on hospitality TV lines and on phones need no change; the keys are part of the playlist they already read.
  • In-room multicast stays on the private TV LAN, as most installations run it today.

TVs and Middleware

Works with the hospitality TV platforms. And with yours.
  • Native integration with major hospitality TV platforms and HTML5 middlewares through the feeds above; a managed Android set-top-box fleet with OTA upgrades, themes, multi-language UI and welcome flows where the property wants one.
  • PMS integration for the guest lifecycle; per-package content through service packaging; parental controls, timeshift, VOD and music; emergency alerts and messaging to every screen on Kylone's own set-top boxes and Android clients, raised from the web UI, through the API, or by a dry contact from the building's or the ship's alarm panel through an industrial I/O module; signage and advertisement modes on the same infrastructure.
  • A middleware vendor integrates once against the guide and ships the same application to every Kylone-equipped property.

Operation

One unit per property. Nothing to attend to.
  • Self-healing by design: source recovery, engine watchdogs, no-signal handling, scheduled windows. The property has no video engineer, and does not need one.
  • Monitoring the way your operations team already works: SNMP with the Kylone MIB and a Prometheus metrics endpoint, per unit and per channel. See Monitoring.
  • A full XML API for a group’s integrator, and a central portal where a hotel group holds its own accounts and reaches its own units through remote access provided by Kylone free of charge: a private network of the group's own units on Kylone's infrastructure, no fee and no subscription, with Kylone engineers joining only at the group's request. It has a switch, and the switch is yours.
  • Upgrades from a URL, backups, audit logging, two-factor authentication, certificate management.

A decade of field-driven releases on one philosophy: stability is the feature.

Fit

Sized for a property, priced for a property.
  • Twenty to a hundred and fifty channels on one unit; multi-building sites add units, each with its own line-up or the same one.
  • Delivered as software for a server of your own, or on a turnkey appliance from a hardware partner with the tuner and modulator cards the property needs, as a 1U or 2U unit for the technical room.
  • When a group outgrows a property headend, the Digital Headend edition is the same engine with the operator features: network-wide signalling, redundancy, compliance monitoring.
Line-upM3U, XMLTV, SAP, stable ids Deliverymulticast, HLS, HTTP-TS, DVB-C Protectionstand-ins, hitless Guestscaptions, content keys, radio