A headend that fits the plant room you actually have.
Fanless, diskless, under 15 watts. It runs on an isolated VLAN and needs no outbound internet connection to stay on air. It sits beneath the patient terminal system you already bought, and is driven by an HTTP API.
The problem
The constraints are the estate and the security policy, not the television.
- Plant rooms have no space, no cooling, and no tolerance for fan noise or spinning disks.
- IT security will not approve equipment that needs an outbound internet connection.
- Wards need different content. Paediatrics is not the same list as a day unit.
- A patient terminal system is already installed, and it is not being replaced.
- Nobody wants another server to patch, monitor and put on the asset register.
What Castmux does about it
One sealed box, one web page, no cloud.
Silent and sealed
Fanless, diskless, low power, no moving parts to fail or to service. arm64 or x86. It can be mounted in a comms cupboard rather than a machine room.
No outbound internet required
Castmux does not phone home to license itself, to update, or to stay on air. Put it on an isolated VLAN with its sources and its multicast groups and it will run there.
Line-ups per ward
Separate multicast groups, or separate DVB-C multiplexes, carry different lists to different parts of the building. A ward's line-up changes without touching the others.
A component, not a takeover
The patient terminal system keeps the bedside screen and the patient relationship. Castmux supplies the transport streams beneath it and takes instructions over HTTP.
Patient information as a channel
roadmap An information channel generated on the appliance for visiting hours and ward notices. Today that slot can carry an external HLS, SRT or RTMP feed you already produce.
Honest failure reporting
Bitrate is measured off the wire by packet capture, not reported by the encoder. Dead multicast routes and duplicate senders are named as such, so estates staff are not chasing a fault inside a box that is working.
A typical installation
Which box, for which estate.
| Property size | Channels | Recommended hardware | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single ward or wing | Up to 15 | IPTV / HDMI Box — €150 | UDP multicast on the ward VLAN. Dual 2.5G LAN. |
| Whole hospital on existing coax | Up to 100 | Cable TV / IPTV Pro Box — €1,899 | DVB-C across 16 frequencies on the distribution already installed, plus UDP multicast. |
| Multi-site trust | More than 100 | Multiple appliances | Speak to us. Fleet management across sites is roadmap; today each appliance is managed on its own page. |
What you get
Enough evidence to close a ticket.
- Per-channel wire bitrate — measured by packet capture on the appliance
- Live viewer counts and client lists — which bed is actually watching
- Per-channel logs — kept on the box, no external log service needed
- Browser preview — check a ward's channel without walking to it
- OpenTelemetry metrics — into whichever dashboard estates or IT already run
- HTTP API — the integration surface for the terminal vendor
- Container or bare metal — deploy it the way your team already deploys things
Our sister project tvheadend.io carries over 2,000 licensed television and radio services over HLS and SRT, which are the two source types Castmux ingests natively. Take a channel package and the Castmux licence costs nothing.See what is available or read thepricing. Rights differ by property type, so tell us whether the screens are in bed bays, day rooms or staff areas and we will quote accordingly. Note that a channel package means the appliance needs a route to those sources, which is a different decision from running it fully isolated.
Honest limits
What Castmux does not do for a hospital.
In this sector Castmux is a component. The buying decision usually sits with the patient terminal system, and it should.
- No EHR or PAS integration. Castmux never sees patient data and does not want to.
- No patient education with chart-back. If a video has to be recorded as watched against a record, that is the terminal system's job.
- No nurse call, no telephony, no telehealth.
- No bedside terminal software. No patient user interface, no menu, no meal ordering, no billing.
- No video on demand and no transcoding. Live services only, in whatever format the source carries.
- No conditional access, no CI/CAM descrambling, no DVB-T.
If you are replacing a whole patient entertainment system, Castmux is not that product. If you are keeping the terminals and replacing the headend behind them, or feeding a new build where the terminal vendor expects multicast or DVB-C to arrive, that is exactly what this is.
Other solutions
Same appliance, different building.
See it running on your own feeds.
Twenty minutes, screen-shared. Bring one stream URL and we will put it on a multicast group while you watch. If it is not right for you, we will say so on the call.