BRANSON, Mo.—Link Electronics has unveiled the Voyavox automated real-time speech-to-text captioning solution for streaming religious services or fast-paced broadcasting environments and will show it at the 2026 National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention, Feb. 17-20, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn.

With advanced speech recognition capabilities and an average latency under 5 seconds, Voyavox transforms the spoken word into clear, accurate text almost instantly, enabling fast and accurate captioning for streamed religious programming.

Voyavox efficiently handles a variety of speaking styles, accents and pacing with ease, making it well-suited for religious services of all types and denominations. Delivering 95% accuracy, Voyavox ensures there are fewer errors, better viewer comprehension of sermons and messaging and a more polished broadcast experience. Besides broadcasting religious services, it is well-suited for live sports, news, political coverage, fast-paced commentary and regular programming.

Voyavox helps broadcasters meet FCC captioning requirements while also expanding their audience reach to include viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Real-time, on-device speech-to-text ensures that content remains accessible during live segments without requiring cloud based captioning services or post-production editing. By embedding accessibility directly into the broadcast workflow, Voyavox makes it easier to consistently deliver inclusive content for any format or setting.

The solution receives audio through a USB connection to the Orion encoder or via a 3.5mm audio jack. With a Graphical User Interface (GUI), users can remote into the system from anywhere on their network. While the Voyavox is typically located in the control room, it can be accessed from virtually anywhere. An easy-to-use user interface allows users to start and stop captioning with the push of a button or have the system set on a continuous loop, providing captioning 24/7 without interference.

The unit comes preset with standard audio and caption data outputs for Link Electronics encoders, making setup for the device quick and efficient. Voyavox is made in the USA and backed by one-year warranty and free 24/7 customer support.

See Link Electronics at NRB booth 422.

More information is available on the company’s website.

THUNDER BAY, Ontario—Dougall Media is one of the last privately owned multi-TV, multi-radio, print paper and digital advertising organizations in Canada. We cover all of Northwestern Ontario, a land mass equivalent in size to the Greater Toronto Area but proportionally representng roughly one-tenth of the GTA population.

The Government of Canada’s 2011 DTV transition inspired a complete investment in digital television infrastructure at Dougall Media. We rebuilt the plant to be fully digital from the ground up right from the mandate. As the engineer in charge of technology decisions, I decided to take the extra steps to establish a complete captioning workflow, rather than simply add a digital encoder at the end of the chain.

Accuracy and Automation
We built several different text-to-speech environments, but as time progressed, the expectations for accuracy and deliverability evolved. That inspired a shift to automated captioning solutions that could more easily reach the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) minimums for accuracy in captions. We also wanted a system that could address more complex processes, such as speech recognition, without user intervention.

That search led us to ENCO’s enCaption solution for live, automated captioning in 2018. Deployed as a fully on-prem captioning workflow, we have continued to evolve our enCaption solution with nearly every generation, including our most recent update in 2025.

One of the first things we focus on in captioning is accuracy as a measurable outcome; automated captioning must deliver not only strong baseline performance, but consistent results across program types and conditions. As enCaption is designed for real-time broadcast environments, it continues to improve in a way that matters operationally. Our accuracy has continued to improve over time and today hovers near 99%.

This is especially impressive when you consider that the captioning workflow exists within the chaos of many separate audio layers. enCaption’s captioning engine can cleanly differentiate between speech over music, effects-heavy segments, multiple speakers, cross talk and more across our entire 5.1 signal chain.

enCaption has proved it can handle complicated audio streams without creating a constant downstream burden that can cause latency. Accuracy is essential, but if captions arrive too late, viewers lose interest and live programming suffers.

Reliability and consistency are also paramount. Captioning correlates with accessibility, compliance, and viewer experience, and everyone watching (including regulators) notice when it fails. enCaption behaves as part of our core infrastructure, as proven during a primary fiber path outage. Video and audio were restored quickly through a backup satellite feed that didn’t carry usable in-band captions.

We were able to route that baseband backup source through a secondary captioning path and regenerate captions using enCaption. Viewers still received accessible programming, and we remained compliant. That experience reinforced why redundancy and routability were non-negotiable requirements for our automated captioning workflow.

More Than Broadcast
Finally, we’re building systems for a future where linear broadcast is only part of the picture. Connected TV, apps, FAST channels and OTT distribution are rapidly becoming more important. Captioning requirements don’t disappear in that world—they expand, often into translation and multilanguage delivery.

Our continued investment in enCaption allows us to look beyond today’s primary broadcast output across our multiplatform delivery footprint moving forward.

enCaption meets the criteria broadcast engineers value, including accuracy you can measure, exceptional speed with ultra-low latency, performance under challenging audio conditions, flexibility in the signal chain and operational resilience in failures.

ENCO’s customer service has also been exceptional across every phase of our relationship, which is just one more reason we value our decision to standardize on their captioning technology.

More information is available on the ENCO enCaption product page.

Media playout provider PlayBox Neo has announced that it is working with AI-Media, a developer of AI-powered captioning technology, to integrate advanced automated captioning, translation, and voice translation solutions into the PlayBox Neo broadcast playout ecosystem.

The companies said that the partnership means that broadcasters, government organizations, universities, and corporate AV facilities now have access to cost-effective, broadcast-quality captioning and multi-lingual voice services, which expands their audience reach while staying compliant with accessibility regulations. The service will also allow them to deploy captions and multilingual translation at broadcast quality without incurring additional staffing or infrastructure costs.

PlayBox Neo reported that it has already deployed AI-Media’s ALTA 2110 encoder to deliver both same-language and translated captions for the live streaming financial news network Cheddar. As its model name indicates, the encoder supports SMPTE ST 2110 workflows.

“PlayBox Neo’s modular playout systems are trusted for their 24/7 reliability and ease of use,” says Mark Lovatt, vice president of global strategic accounts, AI-Media. “Our technology is a perfect fit for this ecosystem. Together, we’re enabling broadcasters, government organizations, universities, and corporate AV facilities of every size to deliver professional-quality captions and multilingual voice with unmatched accuracy and efficiency. This partnership enables more organizations to expand their reach, comply with regulations, and create inclusive viewing experiences at scale.”

As a result of the U.S.-based partnership, PlayBox Neo customers gain access to AI-Media’s ALTA 2110 IP broadcast encoder and LEXI Text, an automated captioning solution that delivers same-language and translated captions with broadcast-grade accuracy and ultra-low latency. The solution also includes LEXI Recorded for pre-recorded content, enabling captions to be produced in less than half the program’s runtime. To ensure high accuracy, AI-Media applies its customized Topic Models, which recognize speakers’ names, industry terminology, and brand-specific language, the companies reported.

In addition to captioning, AI-Media’s new LEXI Voice adds real-time translated voice output. With LEXI Voice, PlayBox Neo customers can provide multilingual viewing experiences across both live and on-demand content. These solutions integrate seamlessly with all PlayBox Neo products, making them accessible to every organization using PlayBox Neo technology.

PlayBox Neo solutions—including AirBox Neo for playout automation, the TitleBox Neo CG, and the PlayBox Neo Suite platform—integrate seamlessly with AI-Media services, ensuring broadcasters can add new capabilities without disrupting existing operations, Playbox Neo reported.

The companies described the key customer benefits as follows:

• FCC Regulatory, European Accessibility Act (EAA), Ofcom and ACMA Compliance: Affordable, scalable way to meet accessibility requirements.
• Expanded Reach: Real-time captioning and voice translation allow channels to engage audiences in new language markets, attracting subscribers and sponsors.
• Lower Costs & Complexity: Eliminates reliance on human captioning, reducing scheduling and staffing challenges.
• Scalable Growth: Easily adaptable for smaller organizations and networks expanding to new events or channels.

“Our customers want solutions that extend their reach without increasing complexity,” explains Van Duke, director of U.S. Operations, PlayBox Neo. “By partnering with AI-Media, we’re giving broadcasters a streamlined way to add captions and real-time multilingual voice directly into their PlayBox Neo workflows. It’s an affordable, broadcast-grade solution that opens up new revenue opportunities while ensuring accessibility and compliance. We’re excited to offer this to our customers.”

The PlayBox Neo Suite is a platform that offers centralized control, monitoring, and administration of an optimized multimedia workflow. The current line of "Channel in a Box" products integrates seamlessly with the PlayBox Neo Suite, maximizing existing investments while providing a unified interface for future upgrades. PlayBox Neo solutions are based on modular products which can be customized to provide the exact capability needed for any scale of channel playout management—from ingest and scheduling to transmission.

For more information on PlayBox Neo, please visit PlayBox Neo at www.playboxneo.com

For more information about AI Media visit AI-Media.tv

AI voice transcription and captioning platform Verbit has added a new feature to its Captivate ASR solution—the ability to identify specific features in automated captioning—that the company is billing as an industry first.

The new feature dramatically improves the quality and clarity of automated captions during live broadcasts by identifying not just speaker changes but the speakers themselves. For the first time in automated broadcast captioning, this allows viewers to see specific speakers identified:

>> JONATHAN WILLIAMS: Let’s look at some of today’s top stories in the news.

>> NICOLE HAINES: Dangerous storms firing off in the southern plains and pushing east.

>> DAN THOMPSON: He pitched a strong game but looks like they’re calling on the bullpen.

Launching with Verbit’s media customers across news, weather and live sports, the speaker ID feature delivers a clearer understanding of fast, overlapping and multispeaker dialogue as well as a more accessible experience for millions who rely on captions., the company said.

“Live ASR caption viewers deserve the same clarity and context that human captioning has long provided,” said Verbit general manager Doug Karlovits. “Our new speaker identification solution leverages the most advanced and innovative speaker models—far surpassing traditional ASR outputs—to achieve the highest accuracy for speaker IDs.”

Verbit explained the workings of the new feature by noting that Verbit’s professional Global Prep Team captures voice profiles, or “voice signatures,” from designated speakers, such as anchors, reporters or sportscasters, before a program goes to air. These signatures are labeled, added to Verbit’s trained acoustic and language models and activated during live broadcasts to accurately and clearly tag speakers in real time.

“We work with customers to determine which speakers they want to identify,” said Karlovits. “And as with all our services, we offer a range of customization options for speaker IDs and can tailor formatting and styles to specific customer requests and preferences.”

The new feature also improves analytics capabilities by enabling broadcasters to track and analyze who said what, information that can be very helpful in terms of compliance, editorial decisions and future AI-powered workflows, the company said.

Verbit’s speaker identification is the latest addition to its Captivate ASR solution, which was recently named to Fast Company’s “Next Big Things in Tech” list, and is designed to meet the specific needs of customers by providing accurate, cost-effective captions and transcripts.

BALTIMORE, Md.—Sinclair today said it has deployed what it believes to be the first-of-its-kind real-time test of AI-powered language translation of newscasts for Spanish-speaking audiences of its WBFF in Baltimore, KABB in San Antonio, Texas, and WPEC in West Palm Beach, Fla.

“At Sinclair, we are committed to leveraging innovative technology to expand access to local journalism,” said Rob Weisbord, chief operating officer and president of local media. “By implementing live AI translation of our newscasts, we’re breaking down language barriers and ensuring that more viewers can engage with Sinclair’s trusted news coverage.”

Sinclair is collaborating with Deeptune, a generative AI language editing company, on the translation of newscasts, news, weather and community updates, Sinclair said.

"We're thrilled to partner with Sinclair on this groundbreaking implementation of our real-time AI translation technology. This collaboration represents a significant step forward in making critical news accessible to diverse communities and demonstrates how AI can be deployed responsibly to serve the public interest,” said Deeptune founder and CEO Tim Lupo.

This real-time AI translation test marks an important step in broadening local news accessibility. Viewers in the participating markets can experience the service by tuning in to their local Sinclair station’s YouTube channel: WBFF, KABB, WPEC and KSNV, Sinclair said.

Sinclair’s use of generative AI began in 2024 when the company began using AI for language translation with “Petko Unfiltered,” a Tennis Channel series (as part of Tennis Channel International’s expansion into other territories) and in newscasts for use with severe weather at WPEC during Hurricane Milton, it said.

More information is available on the broadcast group’s website..

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau has announced that manufacturers of covered apparatus and multichannel video programming distributors have until Aug. 1, 2026, to comply with the requirement to make closed captioning display settings readily accessible to individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Last July 19, the commission released an Report and Order adopting the new “readily accessible” requirement.

The new rules are designed to make watching television easier for those with hearing impairments by giving them greater control over how closed captions are displayed. They are also meant to make it easier for viewers to find the controls.

The R&O, the third by the agency to make television more accessible to those with disabilities, puts in place a “readily accessible” requirement for the display of closed captions that makes it simpler for viewers to access the settings of many covered devices to adjust the captions’ font, size, color and other features. Besides televisions and set-top boxes, covered devices include any device manufactured or used in the United States designed to receive or play back video transmitted with sound.

LONDON—Captioning solutions provider AI-Media said it struck five-year agreement with Central European Media Enterprises (CME) to provide captioning services. The deal is its first major Central and Eastern European broadcast customer win.

AI-Media will deliver live captioning services via its LEXI solution, powered by its SDI encoder network, across CME’s six flagship television stations located in Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechia and Slovakia.

Under this multiyear agreement, AI-Media will provide AI-generated, live captions for each station.

“This partnership with CME is an exciting milestone, representing our first major broadcaster in Eastern Europe and results in millions of CME viewers receiving increased access to content via our LEXI captioning solution in six distinct languages,” John Peck, vice president of international sales at AI-Media, said. “CME’s commitment to accessibility is aligned with AI-Media’s vision, and we’re proud to support their goals with our industry-leading captioning technology. We look forward to supporting CME as they drive accessibility across Central and Eastern Europe.”

“Our research indicates that over 10% of viewers in our markets have some form of hearing difficulty” added Hana de Goeij, CME head of social purpose and sustainability. “By addressing the needs of people with impairments, CME ensures equal access to information and entertainment for all, regardless of ability,”

With the flexibility to scale across additional content in CME’s portfolio, AI-Media’s products empower CME to expand its accessibility offerings over time. Together, AI-Media and CME are setting a new benchmark for inclusivity in broadcasting, making a lasting impact on millions of viewers across the region.

More information about AI-Media’s LEXI captioning solutions is available at www.ai-media.tv.

NEW YORK and SUNNYVALE, Calif.—Warner Bros. Discovery and Google Cloud has announced the deployment of a new, AI-powered captioning solution in the U.S. that utilizes Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform. 

Initially being applied to unscripted programming, this captioning solution's innovative technology is transforming the way Warner Bros. Discovery can create and deliver captions, significantly reducing production time and costs, while enhancing the quality of its captioning for domestic viewers, the two companies reported. 

To maintain high levels of accuracy, Warner Bros Discovery's captioning solution incorporates a workflow that utilizes Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform to optimize captioning, coupled with human-oversight for quality assurance. This data-driven approach enables Warner Bros. Discovery to continuously refine and train the caption AI workflow, further reducing errors and striving to deliver consistently precise captions.

"Providing viewers with high-quality captions is incredibly important to Warner Bros. Discovery," said Avi Saxena, CTO, Direct to Consumer, Warner Bros. Discovery. "Working with Google Cloud to utilize Vertex AI within Warner Bros. Discovery's caption AI workflow has not only helped to accelerate our captioning process, but also has improved our efficiency and speed, while reducing costs."

Notable metrics include:

• Time Savings: The caption AI workflow reduces caption file creation time up to 80% compared to manual captioning.
• Cost Efficiency: The caption AI workflow cuts captioning costs up to 50%, enabling Warner Bros. Discovery to allocate resources more effectively.

"AI has the potential to transform a variety of processes across the media and entertainment industry that deliver real business impact," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud."With its captioning solution, Warner Bros. Discovery is seeing an incredible example of how AI agents can save organizations time and money."

DENVER—Captioning product and service provider VITAC will feature its latest AI technologies and solutions for live captioning and subtitling, live multi-language translation and dubbing and localization at IBC 2024, Sept. 13-16, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

VITAC, a Verbit company, at the show will demonstrate its full range of media access products, tailor-made for the media and entertainment industry, including:

The company will its proprietary AI-powered Captivate captioning solution. Captivate combines technology with decades of experience providing accurate captions at a lower cost than with human-generated captions, the company said. 

Built in-house by transcription, speech, and machine learning experts, Captivate is trained using diverse language models enabling it to understand languages, accents and speech patterns better than generic ASR engines, it said.

VITAC’s language experts prepare and train the system before, during and after events to ensure consistently accurate results. VITAC will show Captivate generating captions for live video from both U.S. and U.K. customers and offer attendees the chance to evaluate the product live, it said.

The company will also feature live machine translation of multi-language content in six languages. This is especially important for the upcoming European Accessibility Act, where multi-language captioning and subtitling for live events is required, it said.

VITAC also will demo its full localization package of services for content creators spanning TV, YouTube and gamers, the company said.

The company will host an informal cocktail mixer Friday, Sept. 13, on the RAI Convention Center Beach at The Playground for senior representatives from the broadcast, streaming and content production sectors with responsibility for localization and accessibility. Email VITAC to register for this invitation-only event.

See VITAXC at IBC 2024 Stand 6.C29b.

More information is available on the company’s website.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced that items tentatively on the agenda for the July Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, July 18, 2024 include votes on closed captioning, a proposal to unlock handsets and NextGen 911.

The FCC described the items on the agenda as follows: 

• Accessibility of User Interfaces, and Video Programming Guides and Menus – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would ensure that consumers are able to readily access user display settings for closed captioning on covered video devices. (MB Docket No. 12-108)
• Advancing the Transition to Next Generation 911 – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would expedite the transition to NG911 and help ensure that the nation’s 911 system functions effectively with the most advanced capabilities available. (PS Docket Nos. 21-479, 18-64)
• Promoting Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Through Handset Unlocking Requirements and Policies – The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would propose the use of broadly applicable handset unlocking policies as a means to improve consumer choice and flexibility, to enhance competition across the mobile wireless marketplace, and to provide for more uniform regulation of service providers. (WT Docket No. 24-186)
• Modernizing E-Rate to Support Wi-Fi Hotspots – The Commission will consider a Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would update the E-Rate program rules to make the off-premises use of Wi-Fi hotspots and wireless Internet services eligible for E-Rate program support. (WC Docket No. 21-31)
• Bringing Common Sense and Fairness to Correctional Facility Phone Rates – The Commission will consider a Report and Order, Order on Reconsideration, Clarification and Waiver, and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would implement the Martha Wright-Reed Act of 2022 by adopting just and reasonable rate caps for incarcerated people’s audio and video communications services, among other reforms.  The Further Notice would seek comment on additional reforms for incarcerated people’s communications services. (WC Docket Nos. 23-62, 12-375)

The Open Meeting is scheduled to commence at 10:30 a.m. ET in the Commission Meeting Room of the Federal Communications Commission, 45 L Street, N.E., Washington, D.C.  While the Open Meeting is open to the public, the FCC headquarters building is not open access, and all guests must check in with and be screened by FCC security at the main entrance on L Street.  Attendees at the Open Meeting will not be required to have an appointment but must otherwise comply with protocols outlined at: https://www.fcc.gov/visit.  

Open Meetings are streamed live at www.fcc.gov/live. 

STAMFORD, Conn.—NBCUniversal has laid out its plans for making the Olympic Games Paris 2024 more accessible to more viewers than ever before with enhanced closed captioning, expanded audio description, and improved digital content accessibility.

Closed captioning, which provides text of the coverage audio for viewers who are Deaf or hard of hearing, will be available for all Olympic events airing across NBCU’s broadcast and cable networks. NBCUniversal will also provide closed captioning for all digital live streams with commentary across Peacock, NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports app.

In addition, it will be providing more audio description services – interspersing broadcast audio with skilled voices describing Olympic scenes and context – for viewers who are blind or visually impaired for the Paris Olympics than any previous Games. 

All coverage on NBC, including daytime, primetime, and late night, and the Gold Zone whip-around show on Peacock, will feature audio description provided by Descriptive Video Works. In a first for a U.S. broadcaster, audio description services for NBC coverage will be provided in stereo, enhancing the quality of sound for viewers, the company reported. 

Additionally, improved web content accessibility, including keyboard navigation, color contrast and support for screen readers, will be available on NBCOlympics.com, NBC.com, the NBC Sports app, and Peacock. Livestreams and replays which offer audio description will have English audio description as a language choice within the players on these digital platforms. To easily find all events with audio description, click here.

“We’re excited to provide all viewers with more accessibility to our Olympics coverage than ever before,” said Gary Zenkel, president, NBC Olympics. “With the goal of enabling all viewers to enjoy the unprecedented excitement of the Olympic Games in Paris, we’re proud to provide closed captioning on all live coverage and the most audio description ever.”

All of this audio description and closed captioning will be available to Comcast Xfinity customers who experience the Games on the Xfinity X1 platform, including on the live Olympic Games coverage delivered in 4K, on Xfinity Stream, and on Xfinity Flex.

“For over a decade, Comcast NBCUniversal has been committed to connecting people to moments that matter,” said Tom Wlodkowski, vice president of accessibility at Comcast. “NBCUniversal’s accessible coverage for this year’s Olympic Games is an important part of our mission. As a consumer of Olympics programming with audio description, I could not be more excited to share in the joy that these Paris Summer Games will bring.”

MIAMI—AI-powered video solutions specialist Akta has announced at StreamTV 2024 in Denver that its platform will now use Google Cloud’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The collaboration between Akta and Google brings cutting-edge AI capabilities to the Akta video platform with no code, delivering new efficiencies and innovation to media and entertainment companies, it said.

Google Cloud's Gemini models enable Akta to leverage advanced AI to enrich video metadata automatically. The models make it possible to extract accurate closed captions and enhance monetization of content as well as streamline several existing video workflows, it said.

"By utilizing Gemini and Google Cloud, we can drive new levels of discoverability of content and provide levels of data relevance never seen before in a content management system," said Akta chairman Alper Turgut. " The capability we are providing is unmatched in the space. This integration also greatly increases the discoverability and inherent value of our customers' content through metadata enhancement."

Akta's platform relies on a human-centered approach. It enables AI-generated metadata, captions and descriptions to be reviewed and approved by skilled professionals. This approach ensures accuracy and accelerates tedious manual tasks with AI, the company said.

"By integrating Google Cloud's Gemini models, media brands can take advantage of next generation tools that drive greater efficiency and improved discoverability," said Anil Saboo, director of industry ISV partnerships at Google Cloud.

Key benefits of integrating Gemini with the Akta platform include automatic tagging of videos with rich metadata, accurate closed captioning, generation of intelligent clip descriptions and the ability to take advantage of Gemini’s AI models without having to write any code.

The new integration is immediately available.

More information is available on the company’s website.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Cineverse announced this week that it is using XL8’s AI-powered machine translation technology to enhance Cineverse’s Matchpoint content management and distribution platform for captioning and localization.

The partnership combines XL8’s real-time AI-powered localization supply chain solutions, including AI-generated subtitle and caption creation along with its proprietary machine translation engines, with Cineverse’s content management and distribution platform. 

This direct API integration streamlines how vast content libraries are captioned and localized, while reducing the costs required to serve the needs of global audiences with more diverse, culturally relevant, accessible translations and captions, Cineverse said. Embedding AI localization into the media supply chain enables Cineverse to offer a broader range of content to their audiences at a lower cost and speed with accuracy and consistency, according to the company.

XL8’s MediaCAT APIs will serve as a critical link in Cineverse’s digital media supply chain, which will leverage XL8’s AI technology to efficiently manage the localization functions within the company’s proprietary Matchpoint all-in-one OTT and streaming platform. Matchpoint streamlines the distribution process and enhances the overall management and monetization of digital media by automating workflows with AI capabilities. 

As a provider of Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) technology, Cineverse says the new integration offers its channel operators a scalable, fully automated content delivery product suite that now includes translation, captioning, and localization.

MediaCAT builds innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to provide high-quality, real-time media content translation. The platform integrates seamlessly into existing automated workflows while adhering to the industry’s standards for security and compliance.

“Our partnership with Cineverse demonstrates our ongoing commitment to innovation and leadership in the AI-powered media localization market,” said Josh Pine, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at XL8. “Embedding our platform into an automated media delivery system for FAST represents an industry milestone, and we’re thrilled to be part of a solution that empowers media companies with fast, accurate, and culturally nuanced translations to expand their reach to global audiences.”

Cineverse’s Chief Operating Officer & Chief Technology Officer, Tony Huidor, added, “Integrating XL8’s top-tier AI auto caption creation and machine translation engines into Matchpoint allows us to leverage next-generation technology to help Cineverse and our partners to easily expand our business internationally without incurring significant costs. Through the power of Matchpoint and XL8’s MediaCAT, our content partners can now more effectively maximize their distribution and improve monetization for their content libraries.”

NEW YORK—Paramount Global and The Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) have announced a partnership that ensures hundreds of hours of Nickelodeon's hit animated and live-action series will be accessible to families with young viewers and students with disabilities. 

The multi-year agreement commences with several Nickelodeon series, including “Bossy Bear”, “Tiny Chef Show”, “Blues Clues & You!” and “Santiago of the Seas” and will include distribution via DCMP's free streaming services for families and schools. Additional Nickelodeon series will be made available on DCMP's services on a rolling basis through 2029.

DCMP is providing audio description through a Television Access grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of the grant is to improve results for children with disabilities through support for the addition of audio description to widely available programs with educational value.

The Nickelodeon series will air and stream with captions and audio description. Audio description is a secondary audio track with additional narration that provides access to key visual elements of a video for persons who are blind, without interfering with the audio or dialogue.

"This opportunity enables Paramount Global to expand the reach and accessibility of our content to the DCMP audience, which includes young viewers and their families, through added audio description on Nickelodeon. The impact and nature of this partnership is something that the DCMP and our Paramount team are proud of," said Mark Turits, vice-president of captioning and audio description, Paramount Global Access Services.

"We are proud to be partnering with Paramount Global to make important programming accessible for children who are blind and visually impaired," said DCMP CTO Kyle Sisk. "Not only will more high-quality television content be accessible to the public, but teachers and families will benefit from DCMP's targeted distribution to schools."

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—AI-Media has unveiled its AI-Powered LEXI Captioning Tool Kit. This comprehensive collection of automated captioning solutions combines cutting-edge AI technologies to meet the integrated needs of content creators and distributors worldwide, the company said. 

"At AI-Media, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of captioning technology. Our LEXI Tool Kit is a result of years of research and development, and we are proud to offer a transformative solution that enhances the accessibility and inclusivity of media content," said James Ward, Chief Sales Officer at AI-Media.

The AI-Powered LEXI Tool Kit is designed to address challenges faced by media companies, broadcasters, event producers, educational institutions, and other content producers in delivering cost-effective and accurate captions and subtitles for live and pre-recorded content that can be easily reused in other customer applications.

The Tool Kit is comprised of six key solutions each designed to address different captioning needs, enabling the consumer to mix and match key components to suit their business requirements. The solutions are compatible with the company’s encoder series via the iCap Cloud Network creating the ultimate captioning ecosystem.

The six solutions are:

• LEXI Live Automatic Captioning: Delivering real-time captions with unparalleled accuracy, LEXI consistently achieves over 98% accuracy. Offering speaker identification and intelligent caption placement, LEXI Live Automatic Captioning is the cornerstone of the Tool Kit, offering captions rivalling that of human captioners – at a fraction of the cost, the company reported.
• LEXI Recorded: Accelerating captioning for post-production content, LEXI Recorded seamlessly integrates into Media Asset Management Systems (MAM), ensuring fast turnaround times for caption file delivery. Users can caption in over 30 languages, choose from multiple file formats including SRT, VTT, and TXT, to fit their specific requirements; and make use of the API function and automation for a zero-touch solution.
• LEXI Translate: Breaking down language barriers, LEXI Translate allows users to effortlessly translate live captions and subtitles to and from over 50 languages with more added every month. Perfect for corporate meetings, global events, and broadcasts of multilingual content, LEXI Translates accuracy ensures that important nuances are effectively translated.
• LEXI DR (Disaster Recovery): Never go off the air with the ultimate failover solution. LEXI DR enables users to host their fully redundant iCap and LEXI servers, ensuring uninterrupted captioning in challenging situations like cloud-based outages or internet connectivity issues. No more missing captions due to internet outages!
• LEXI Local: LEXI Local delivers highly secure live, automatic captions, on-premises and off the cloud, meaning elevated security and greater control. LEXI Local is ideal for any organization such as corporations or Government agencies requiring increased security of their content.
• LEXI Library: LEXI Library archives captioned content, making it easily searchable and accessible. With customizable permissions and Single Sign On, time-stamped live captions can be accessed securely in real-time or post-session, simplifying the process of transcribing, and distributing captioned sessions, the company said. 

The Tool Kit presents a comprehensive solution to maximize the benefits of captioning and translation. Fully compatible with AI-Media's best-in-class SDI and IP caption encoders, the Tool Kit simplifies customer workflows by providing seamless interoperability.

For more information about the AI-Powered LEXI Captioning Tool Kit, visit www.ai-media.tv. 

BROOKLYN—Ai-Media has unveiled LEXI  Viewer, a new captioning solution that the company said will revolutionize how event organizers captivate and engage audiences.

"Enhancing the live event experience for all individuals is our unwavering commitment, and as  pioneers in the industry, we proudly present LEXI Viewer as a groundbreaking solution," says James  Ward, chief sales officer of Ai-Media. "With the exciting addition of click-to-caption functionality,  coupled with cutting-edge technology and our powerful AI-driven captioning solution, we are  revolutionizing inclusivity and uplifting the engagement of diverse audiences.” 

LEXI Viewer offers a user-friendly and cost-effective solution to deliver high quality captioning and enhance inclusivity, the company explained. Users can effortlessly click their  way to captioning, taking full control of LEXI through the front panel LCD screen or a wireless  remote. This functionality ensures a captivating and dynamic experience for both event organizers and attendees alike, the company said. 

More specifically, LEXI Viewer boasts an array of display modes that include:  

• Full Screen Mode: Captions are displayed on the entire screen, offering maximum  accessibility to a large audience. Various line spacing and text size options are available,  accommodating individual preferences. 
• Background Image Mode: Users can overlay four rows of captions on a custom background  image, providing complete configurability of caption appearance, including font, text size,  positioning, and color. This allows event organizers to maintain their branding while  prioritizing inclusivity. 
• Caption Decoder Mode: Captions can be displayed over the input video to mimic the  behavior of a consumer caption decoder while offering customization options for font and  text color. 
• Scaler Mode: Users can maintain full visibility of presentation content by scaling down the  input video by 20% and displaying two rows of captions above or below the video. 
• Furthermore, event organizers can enhance captioning security and retain greater control of their  data by pairing LEXI Viewer with LEXI Local. This powerful solution provides LEXI automatic captions  on-premises, eliminating cloud-related concerns and ensuring complete data privacy. 

"We understand the importance of data security and privacy, and our LEXI Local solution addresses  these concerns, providing event organizers with enhanced control over their valuable data," added Ward. "With LEXI Viewer and LEXI Local, we are offering a comprehensive accessibility  solution that goes beyond expectations."

For more information email sales@ai-media.tv.

NOVI, MI.—ENCO has acquired French captioning company DoCaption, a developer and manufacturer of captioning, subtitling, and ancillary data solutions for the broadcast and AV industries. The announcement marks ENCO’s third business acquisition in the past 12 months, following the acquisitions of TranslateTV last July and RUSHWORKS in January. ENCO closed the DoCaption deal on July 1, with ENCO retaining DoCaption’s entire product line, intellectual property, staff, and business operations based in Valence, France.

ENCO says the acquisition will extend its reach into captioning workflows for broadcast and AV applications to offer more complete, integrated and cost-efficient solutions for broadcasters and media companies, such as OTT channels, MVPDs and streaming services. Similarly, ENCO can offer more complete solutions to caption meetings, lectures, and presentations in live AV environments, it said. . ENCO has long worked with DoCaption to deliver live, automated captions  and insert closed captions into live broadcasts. 

ENCO plans to add an entirely new product line with the DoCaption acquisition. DoCaption offers a broad range of broadcast ancillary data solutions that cross the encoding, conversion and transcoding, and monitoring spectrum. DoCaption’s products also include specific solutions for SCTE 104 metadata signaling and insertion for ad markers, SMPTE timecode generation for synchronization, scoreboard data encoding for venue displays and integrated open captions generators and keyers.

DoCaption specializes in developing embedded, integrated hardware and software solutions across its product lines. As DoCaption develops all hardware in-house, ENCO and DoCaption engineers can freely develop more complete solutions with future media workflow opportunities in mind ENCO said.

“DoCaption represents our most strategic acquisition to date as it pertains to future product and business development,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “Immediately, we can now sell captioning encoders alongside our on-premises and cloud-based enCaption systems to offer more flexible and affordable single-source solutions. Moving forward, our combined team of engineers can work together and leverage DoCaption’s intellectual property to develop new on-board applications that address emerging standards and customer requirements. That includes innovating new solutions that represent a convergence of our strengths to serve future captioning workflows.”

DoCaption products are available globally today and widely used in Europe, Australia and the Americas, according to Co-Founder and Director, Product Management and Worldwide Sales, Renaud Desportes. “We bring strong expertise in broadcast and captioning standards in every part of the world, and understand how to interconnect these different systems,” said Desportes. “Our customers trust us to develop solutions that support various standards, with no frame delay, very fast and smooth response, and very reliable network operation. Working together with ENCO allows us to better serve new customers with continued innovation, global distribution, and advanced support.” 

Launched in 2009 DoCaption provides regular and live captioning solutions for major institutional French TV broadcasters and has also developed fully tailored solutions for Stock Exchange and banks data broadcast, as well as industrial automation systems.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Agora has launched a Real-Time Transcription solution. The offering provides developers with the fast, accurate, and affordable automated transcription, and subtitling capabilities that can be easily integrated into any app or service.

"The launch of our new Real-Time Transcription solution provides instant audio transcription to developers and brands, allowing them to boost accessibility and discoverability for their end users,” said Tony Zhao, CEO and co-founder of Agora. “This powerful cloud-based technology is designed to seamlessly integrate with any app or service.”

Key features include:

• Live Transcription: Transcribe real-time audio and video to include captions to improve audience reach and experience.
• Speaker Labeling: Easily label who said what with a speaker dropdown to ensure accurate speaker information with the transcription.
• Searchable Transcripts: Search for words, phrases, and themes across all transcripts. Leverage transcript as input to ChatGPT or other generative AI solutions.
• Recording Captioning: Play back audio or video recordings with closed captions (CC).
• Channel-Based Transcription: Transcribe with multiple active hosts in a channel and deliver a transcript to all participants while only paying for the channel duration—not the number of users or speakers.

While closed captioning makes any audio or video content more accessible, the real-time nature of Agora’s solution extends that accessibility to live audio and video, the company reported. 

The transcription service provides instant subtitles for any live meeting, conference, event, cast, or video stream—while enabling other essential services such as content moderation. The solution scales from one-to-one video calls to many-to-many streaming, and can support transcription with up to 100 people in an audio chat group. In addition to increasing accessibility for people with hearing impairments or difficulty understanding a spoken language, Real-Time Transcription improves the discoverability of audio and video content without the need for replay.

"Any industry that is reaching their audience or customers through audio or video will benefit from Real-Time Transcription technology,” said Zhao. "We're excited to see the impact our solution will have on improving engagement with audiences everywhere."

Agora’s Real-Time Transcription solution is currently in public beta, with general availability planned for Q3 2023.

For more information about Real-Time Transcription, visit: https://www.agora.io/en/products/real-time-transcription/.

Ai-Media has launched 24/7 live subtitling on GB News. The broadcaster becomes the first in the UK to simplify subtitle delivery with Ai-Media’s end-to-end subtitling technology and infrastructure.

GB News now subtitles its 24/7 coverage using Ai-Media’s Smart Lexi hybrid subtitling solution, which combines ASR automation with human curation.

Smart Lexi subtitles are delivered to screens via Ai-Media’s iCap Encode Pro SDI encoder and its iCap Network.

Speaking about the broadcaster’s decision to employ Ai-Media’s subtitling technology, GB News head of technology and operations, Stephen Willmott said: “The combination of AI technology with human oversight means that after an initial bedding down period, our captions will be 98.5 per cent accurate.

“We committed to this a while ago. It’s great to be able to launch them now and viewers have already told us how delighted they are.”

Ai-Media’s general manager – global strategic accounts, Mark Lovatt added:  “We are extremely pleased that GB News has become the first UK broadcaster to subtitle its 24/7 coverage with Ai-Media’s end-to-end range of subtitling technology and infrastructure.

“By partnering with Ai-Media, GB News will benefit from the best of our ASR technology, encoder hardware and subtitling infrastructure to simplify subtitle delivery and ensure accessibility for its millions of viewers in the UK, Ireland and around the globe.”

MELBOURNE, Australia—Ai-Media Technologies Limited, a global provider of technology-driven captioning, transcription and  translation services, has announced that it has renewed its exclusive  agreement with Australian broadcaster Seven Network (Seven) for an additional five year term. 

As part of the new five year contract, Seven will extend its use of Ai-Media’s offerings from traditional premium  Services to technology products iCap Encode, Lexi and Smart Lexi, and an  enhanced use of SubSilo 

In addition, Seven will be the first free-to-air Australian broadcaster to transition to Ai Media’s iCap network, adopting the full suite of technology products, targeting a  Q3 FY23 roll-out, the companies said. 

“We are extremely pleased to have signed this renewal which showcases the strength of our  new iCap product offering as we continue to deliver the best possible captioning quality with  the highest published uptime in the industry,” explained Ai-Media co-founder and CEO Tony Abrahams. “Since 2016 Ai-Media has been the exclusive  provider of captioning services to Seven across all markets. This renewal includes a  significant technology uplift delivering improvements in scalability and cost for Seven.”

“Through the pioneering use of our SubSilo product, team members at Seven can now use embedded captioning to search extended video archives, he added. “The full suite of Ai-Media’s products and services will be available to Seven once we  complete the transition to the iCap network, which is expected to occur in Q3 FY23.” 

“The agreement further accelerates our technology-driven growth through recurring revenue and speeds up the transition of our top customers to the iCap network and SaaS products Lexi  and Smart Lexi,” Abrahams also explained. “This will also deliver viewers much more choice of captioned content, helping  to deliver further on our vision of making the world’s content accessible for everyone.” 

An element of the Seven renewal was Seven’s organization-wide implementation of SubSilo,  which uses Ai-Media’s captioning to power automated search across Seven’s extensive media  archive. 

“We have partnered with Ai-Media since 2016 and have ensured that our captioning is the  best possible quality for all of our viewers who rely on this important service,” said Seven Network director of broadcast operations. “Our focus is on  tight technical integration between our systems, Ai-Media and our playout operations. This  renewal, further enhances the ability to deploy accurate automated captions across more  content as well as improved media search for Seven’s internal teams by utilizing technology from Ai-Media’s recent EEG acquisition.”

Ai-Media also reported that under the five-year renewal agreement, Ai-Media will deliver all captioning across the Seven network at lower costs to Seven, driven by the rollout of the iCap network through the iCap  Encode products and the automated Lexi and Smart Lexi SaaS products. 

In addition, Seven will purchase  hardware from Ai-Media and will pay a monthly captioning fee (for an agreed amount of  captioning) and a monthly equipment support fee. Seven will continue to benefit from the  integrated SubSilo product which fully indexes archived content across the network with  “search by caption” functionality available 24 hours after broadcast, the companies said. 

BOSTON—3Play Media, a provider of video accessibility services, including captioning, subtitling and audio description, announced today that as part of its acquisition of Captionmax, a provider of live and recorded captioning, localization, and audio description, it has been fully integrated into the 3Play Media brand. National Captioning Canada (NCC), the largest live captioning provider in Canada and a subsidiary of Captionmax, was also acquired and has been rebranded as 3Play Media Canada, the company said.

“We are thrilled to bring Captionmax and NCC into the 3Play Media family. From the very beginning, it was clear that all 3 of our businesses were aligned around a few critical values: delivering peace of mind, meeting our customers where they are, and being trusted advisors in the space of media accessibility. This shared DNA enables us to deliver the most robust media accessibility platform on the market today and has exciting ramifications for our customers, particularly those in the media and enterprise sectors, including Canada, where we are able to deepen our expertise and relationships,” Josh Miller, co-founder and co-CEO, 3Play Media said. “With all our collective capabilities under the 3Play Media umbrella, no other company in the market can deliver the scale and reliability of the 3Play offering, cementing our position as the leader in quality media accessibility services in North America.”

With the integration, 3Play Media says it now offers “the widest breadth of offerings for media accessibility services in North America,” providing closed captioning, live captioning, transcription, broadcast scripting, audio description, subtitling & translation services, and an interactive media player. The brand integration’s first phase includes the launch of a partner program and the addition of post-production tools like voice artist audio description, expert caption styling, and broadcast scripting to the 3Play platform.

“By incorporating Captionmax into the 3Play Media brand, we are now able to deliver a high-end, highly customizable and scalable solution for post-production and broadcast live services to our media clients,” Chris Antunes, co-founder and co-CEO, 3Play Media, said. “For the first time, all the tools broadcasters and post-production studios need will be available in a centralized, platform-based solution, allowing 3Play Media to provide the most innovative solutions to support the media and entertainment industry.”

3Play Media Canada will remain focused exclusively on the Canadian market, providing the region with its own business development and account teams that understand the inherent needs of Canadian broadcasters, corporate entities, government agencies, and educational institutions.

“3Play Media Canada will continue to follow the path set by NCC for more than 30 years when it started delivering accessibility solutions to Canadian broadcasters,” said Melina Nathanail, President of 3Play Media Canada. “Having run NCC as a family business for that period of time, I couldn’t be more excited to adopt the 3Play brand, joining a team that feels like a family and has the same passion for accessibility that has driven us all these years to deliver the best to the Canadian market.”

“The synergies between 3Play Media and Captionmax - and how both of our customer bases benefit from this relationship - are obvious, making the rebrand a natural transition,” Truck Morrison, SVP of Corporate Development, 3Play Media, said. “3Play’s deep expertise in technology-driven accessibility at scale combined with our own history with live broadcast creates a compelling, complete media solution that cements 3Play as the most robust media accessibility provider in North America.”

To recognize and celebrate the integration of both brands, 3Play Media will host a virtual public event open to anyone on September 29, 2022. For more information, please visit: https://www.3playmedia.com/rebrand-celebration/.

FREMONT, Calif.—Digital Nirvana has unveiled an upgrade for its Trance self-service SaaS application, a tool that supports transcription, closed captioning and subtitle generation and automatic translations to localize content within media companies’ workflows.

Enhancements offered in Trance 4.0 include elaborate account management, modular rights for users and advance pro-captioning window for enterprises and individual users, Digital Nirvana said.

With its new modular application approach, Trance 4.0 can be used as a combined or individual tool for transcription, captioning, text localization or conformance of existing captions, it said. 

The latest version’s new and improved transcription window can be used as a standalone app rather than being part of a three-step transcription, captioning and subtitling workflow that only outputs after each step is completed.

The company has made major changes to the pro-captioning window to make it more user-friendly and efficient. Machine-generated timecodes can be adjusted using spectrogram and manual inputs and the window now enables user to upload media, generate automatic captions and display using desired presets defined by the user or organization, it said.

An extension of the pro-captioning window, text localization can now be used as a Trance module to focus on localizing captions. Users can now import existing captions and quickly use the machine translation feature to generate highly accurate localized text specifically designed for subtitling purposes, the company said.

The caption-conformance app allows users to import text with new presets to conform with various publishing platforms. It automatically reviews text and highlights any nonconformities with selected guidelines, it said.

Digital Nirvana also has upgraded Trance’s management functions. The dashboard now allows better real-time visibility into which users are online and the progress of jobs.

The new version offers enhanced user control over processing jobs with the addition of the ability to choose from available jobs, import a transcript and create captions with existing or new presets, it said.

Trance 4.0 now allows enterprises to assign work items to internal staff and to share work items with Digital Nirvana’s service team to receive fully qualified, human-curated output using the same application, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NOVI, Mich.—The Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA’s) Employee Education System has deployed the ENCO enCaption automated caption system to increase productivity and reduce time to market for products and services while continuing to offer accurate captioning services, the company announced today.

The education system, which offers training content, wellness programming and departmental communications to VA staff and veterans around the country, adopted the automated captioning system after successfully piloting an ENCO captioning solution, the company said.  

Building on its satisfaction with the pilot and the purchase of its first enCaption unit, the education system is now adding two more enCaption units to dedicate to real-time, live captioning of its two 24/7 satellite program channels, the company said.

The VA Knowledge Network (VAKN) satellite uplink center in St. Louis distributes two programming channels to 250 VA Medical Centers and Community Based Outpatient Clinics nationwide. The VA-1 channel is dedicated to delivering training and communication to over 400,000 VA staff and contractors.

The Veteran News Network (VNN), is also distributed to both internal and external audiences 24/7 on platforms that include YouTube and Roku. VNN offers programming on Veteran’s health issues, benefits, nutrition and other aspects of care. All VAKN content is closed captioned for regulatory compliance and to ensure full accessibility, it said.

“With our previous workflow, we needed to schedule captioners to dial in, but the timeframes for our master control engineers were pretty tight,” said Hugh Graham, telecommunications specialist at the VHA Employee Education System. “The engineer would need to start playback of the original content on one device and record the captioned result on another. It was very labor-intensive, and any technical glitches became a significant bottleneck.”

The accuracy of enCaption’s speech-to-text transcription was particularly attractive. “Human captioners do a great job, but our unique medical terminology can be difficult for them,” said Graham. “We can’t always send them a script of what will be said, so they are at the mercy of the information we give or don’t give them.”

“enCaption allows us to upload word models for spelling things like medical terms and the names of our leadership, which it can then use for all future captioning.," he continued. "Even without the word models, enCaption has proven to be amazingly accurate for most of our content right out of the box.”

Content is played out from a media server into enCaption device. The resulting captioning data and video is fed to an EEG 470 caption encoder and embedded. The closed captioned video can be routed to a record device, uplink channel or to a streaming media encoder for distribution, the company said.

The new enCaption systems will be dedicated to real-time, 24/7 captioning of the VA-1 and VNN satellite channels, YouTube, and Roku distribution. The offline enCaption unit will be used for ad-hoc captioning of real-time sources or file-based content, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

CAMBRIDGE, U.K. & NOVI, Mi.—Speechmatics has announced that ENCO has chosen its Autonomous Speech Recognition (ASR) technology for ENCO’s new enCaption5 automated captioning and transcription solution. 

This partnership will enable AV professionals, content producers, and broadcasters to create highly accurate transcripts, adding closed or open captions to both live and pre-recorded AV content regardless of the speaker’s demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect or location, the companies said. 

“Speechmatics’ core technology is without a doubt the most accurate of the AI speech-to-text engines available,” said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO. “More than just fantastic technology, however, Speechmatics has also been a great partner. We worked with them previously on enCaption4 and they have been very responsive to our feedback, helping us drive the enCaption platform forward to meet the unique needs of our markets and customers. We’re excited to use their latest technology for enCaption5.”

Speechmatics are global experts in deep learning and speech recognition working with solution and service providers to integrate into their stack regardless of their industry or use case. Speechmatics’ technology is trained on huge amounts of unlabeled data without the need for human intervention, delivering a far more comprehensive understanding of all voices and dramatically reducing both AI Bias and errors in speech recognition.

The fifth generation enCaption5 harnesses Speechmatics’ technology in a cloud-native architecture – which can also be deployed in hybrid or on-premises workflows – and an intuitive user interface optimized for professional AV deployments, broadcast environments, and conversational AI applications. 

In addition, enCaption5 offers such features as integration with external vocabulary sources; AV signal input and output; media indexing and search; confidence scoring; and the ability to review and edit transcripts – with manual refinements automatically updating the system’s word filters to improve future accuracy. enCaption5 also offers an open, advanced API for third-party developers, and is backed by world-class, U.S.-based support.

ENCO will be leveraging the entire suite of Speechmatics’ market-leading features for enCaption5. These include:

• Coverage of 34 languages
• Advanced Punctuation
• Custom Dictionary (the ability to add context specific words to the Speechmatics dictionary in real-time) and
• Entity Formatting (consistently and more accurately interpret how entities such as numbers, currencies, and addresses should appear in written form)

For more information about ENCO and enCaption5 visit www.enco.com/encaption. For more information about Speechmatics visit www.speechmatics.com.

LOS ANGELES—MediaPlatform has announced that it has integrated a new suite of managed captioning services with its MediaPlatform Broadcaster live webcasting platform.

The services are provided by MediaPlatform's Broadcast Services team via a new partnership with closed captioning technology provider EEG Video. 

The integration will include a full suite of EEG live captioning offerings, including EEG's cloud-hosted Falcon live stream captioning service and Lexi automated live captioning capabilities. 

Falcon injects real-time captions into the video stream for mission-critical, high-profile events while Lexi automated captioning offers a simple and affordable way to add live stream and overlay captions into every live webcast, the company explained. 

The integration also includes Lexi with iCap Translate, which provides automated, affordable translation into nearly 20 major languages and allows viewers to choose from up to four different language drop downs during any live webcast.

"We are pleased to now include fully managed and integrated live closed captioning capabilities as part of our webcast services offering," said Shaun Brown, GM MediaPlatform Broadcast Services. "Via close collaboration with EEG, our customers can choose from a variety of captioning services which we now provide as a seamless part of their hosted event services. In one step, they can be fully compliant with ADA guidelines and improve inclusiveness through our integrated multi-lingual captioning offering," Brown said.

MediaPlatform Broadcast Services provides remote and on-location production, webcast event management and customized training and support services for MediaPlatform's Global 2000 customers, the company explained. 

In addition to MediaPlatform Broadcaster, MediaPlatform's enterprise video platform includes the MediaPlatform On Demand video content management portal, MediaPlatform Edge eCDN and MediaPlatform's distribution-agnostic Smartpath intelligent video routing technology, and MediaPlatform's real-time analytics suite including the Event Success Dashboard quality of experience and Video Business Intelligence quality of service offerings.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—EEG Video has launched the Lexi 2.0 Automatic Captioning Service, the second generation of its automated cloud-hosted closed captioning service. The new edition touts higher accuracy, new workflow enhancements and a new control set.

Lexi  2.0 is capable of achieving 95% accuracy in its closed captioning services, according to EEG, with the company citing reports that local news program samples have experienced 87% to 95.5% accuracy. The company cites this boost in accuracy to Lexi 2.0’s reduction in word errors, improved punctuation, improved response to fast speech and improved response to background noise.

EEG has also added Core Models, an expansion of its Topic Models systems for accurately displaying custom vocabulary and phrases. Core Models can recognize topics, immerse itself in distinctive vocabulary and observe context through the absorption of relevant web data unique to each implementation. 

The new Lexi 2.0 also offers the Scheduling feature, which helps schedule, monitor and manage captioning jobs. Users can program a future start and end time for automatic captioning and set recurring events. Scheduling also features the new Instances capability, which is a template of settings that can be duplicated across different sessions.

For more information, visit www.eegnet.com.  

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—EEG Video has announced the availability of Core Models for its Lexi automatic caption solution. 

The new feature expands on the usefulness of EEG’s Topic Models system to enable accurate display of custom vocabulary and phrases. It allows Lexi to recognize topics, immerse itself in distinctive vocabulary and observe context by absorbing relevant web data unique to each implementation, the company said.

“It only takes one look at off-the-shelf speech-to-text transcripts to realize that customization and updates are a critical task, but one that many end users are limited in time and experience to effectively perform on their own,” says Bill McLaughlin, vice president of Product Development for EEG Video.

“EEG’s experts have the deep data curation skills needed to update AI models effectively and efficiently. This leverages the shared needs of our many AI captioning customers to produce Core Models, dramatically reducing the customization requirements of individual customers in common applications,” he said.

With Topic Models, Lexi can perform in real time with a high degree of accuracy by addressing poor recognition of topic-specific vocabulary. This includes less common proper nouns, including names of people, places and products, the company said.

These models also enhance recognition of entire phrases, jargon, vocabularies or speaking styles that are typical in a certain context but not another, such as during a baseball telecast, EEG Video said.

Some commercial off-the-shelf speech-to-text engines do not recognize certain words and phrases, such as “coronavirus” or “COVID-19,” offering substitutions like “culvert” for the latter,  the company said. Eliminating these errors is critical for breaking news broadcasts to maintain the credibility of captions and to improve audience engagement and satisfaction, it said.

After three years of providing AI captioning for a wide variety of events and media, EEG’s AI team has distilled common vocabulary training cases into a set of Core Models. Customers also can build their own individual Topic Models on top of an EEG Core Model, it said. 

As EEG continues to evolve and add to the Core Model, the derived individual user models are also automatically updated to merge individual and Core changes, it said.

Current EEG Core Models exist in English for:

• Headline News (United States-focused): more than 15,000 entities and phrases;
• Sports: Baseball (MLB-focused): more than 10,000 entities and phrases; 
• Christian Broadcasting: more than 15,000 entities and phrases; 
• Legislative and Municipal Sessions: more than 1,000 entities and phrases; and 
• Weather (United States focused): more than 1,000 entities and phrases. 

More information is available on the company’s website. 

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—EEG Video has installed a new feature into its Lexi Automated Captioning service, the Scheduling workflow that enables users to schedule, monitor and manage captioning jobs.

Lexi, or Lexi Local, users can use the Scheduling feature to program a future start and end time for automatic captioning. Recurring events can also be set up for regularly scheduled programming.

The Scheduling solution also offers Instances, which gives users the ability to create a template for easy duplication of settings across different sessions to specify the same language, topic models, access codes, caption appearance and more are uniform for each desired session.

Users of EEG’s Falcon Live Streaming RTMP Caption Encoder who utilize Lexi will also benefit from the new Scheduling feature, the company says.

“As the adoption of cloud-based automatic captioning increases, users expect these situations to integrate more permanently and smoothly into their day-to-day production,” said Bill McLaughlin, vice president of product development, EEG Video. “Lexi’s new capability further reduces the learning curve and time commitment to successfully deploy live automatic captioning.”

For more information, visit www.eegent.com.  

NEW YORK—The NAB Show New York will serve as the background for Enco to showcase its latest advances with machine learning for the enCaption4 automated live captioning system and enTranslate automated live translation systems designed to help hard-of-hearing and non-native-speaking audiences.

The enCaption4 is used to automate and augment live or pre-recorded content with closed or open captions in near real time. New features on display include advanced punctuation capabilities that enhance the accuracy and readability of transcriptions for full stops, commas, exclamation marks and question marks in English, German, Spanish and French. Enco describes the system as being able to detect the context of sentences to insert the appropriate punctuation and capitalization. Other new features offered are an enhanced scheduling interface, a web API for third-party integration and additional boosts to accuracy and speed.

The same speech-to-text engine in the enCaption4 is used in the enTranslate system, featuring advanced translation technology powered by Veritone. The enTranslate platform provides subtitles and secondary or tertiary closed captions in alternative languages, while users can also embed translated captions in VOD content or show live. It features a Neural Machine Translation methodology that blends AI and sophisticated linguistics modelling to provide translations based on context of current words and phrases. There are 46 languages supported by enTranslate.

Enco will display these two platforms at its booth, N355, during NAB Show New York, Oct. 16-17 at the Javits Convention Center.

LAS VEGAS—Digital Nirvana has announced the products that it will be featuring at its booth for the 2019 NAB Show, it includes the MonitorIQ 6.0, Metadator 2.0, Caption Quality Check, a postproduction captioning service and the Closed Caption Synchronization system.

The MonitorIQ is a Linux-based system that provides signal and loudness monitoring, air-check logging, competitive analysis and content repurposing. It can automatically record and monitor linear and/or OTT streams and alerts for loss of video, audio or closed captions. Other features include live streaming and recording, SmartSearch, SmartAlerts and frame-accurate cut clip editing with an option for variable-speed playback. New to the platform is an updated user interface that features a built-in HTML5 player that eliminates the need to install Flash of ActiveX.

With the Metadator 2.0, Digital Nirvana offers a scalable SaaS platform that automates the process of metadata generation for production, pre-production and live content. The 2.0 version includes off-the-shelf integration with AVID Interplay for automated speech-to-text generation that simplifies the process of automated transcription and metadata generation and is capable of object identification, on-screen text recognition, shot-change recognition and explicit content detection.

Caption Quality Check is a newly launched product that is designed to help with producing closed captions for different distribution channels. Key features include reporting operational and technical non-conformance, automatic corrections, format conversion and frame-rate conversion. The system accepts different file formats and users can choose a combination of automatic and manual services for outputting and receiving publish-ready captions in the formats requested for distribution via various platforms, including OTT and VOD.

Then there is the Closed Caption Generation platform that offers postproduction captioning services and can take in video in a variety of formats and provide output caption files in multiple formats. Features include secure protocol implementation and speech-to-text integration. Users can also opt for caption files in multiple formats for the same video asset.

Rounding out Digital Nirvana’s captioning services is the Closed Caption Synchronization SaaS platform that automates the process of repurposing closed captions. The system can receive and deliver content in multiple input and output formats and is integrated with speech-to-text technology.

Digital Nirvana will be located at booth SU9807.

To register for the NAB Show, visit www.nabshow.com.

PALM SPRINGS, CALIF.—This year’s HPA Tech Retreat will once again see a gathering of industry-leading thinkers who will discuss the latest trends in the creation, management and dissemination of video content. The weeklong Palm Springs event, which is capped at just 700 attendees and begins Monday, Feb. 11, will feature a main conference program, the “TR-X Tech Retreat Xtra” focused on eSports, as well as breakfast roundtables and a curated innovation zone, along with other opportunities for industry leaders to meet and exchange ideas.

The event officially gets underway with the Tuesday Supersession, which will highlight Next-Gen Workflows and Infrastructure, featuring insight from Tom Graham of Dolby on Dolby Vision from set to consumer; Tina Eckman of Dolby on Dolby Atmos from set to consumer; and Scott Kramer of Netflix on immersive sound from capture through post production.

HDR AND THE MOVE TO 8K

Numerous sessions on Wednesday including an HDR “Mini” Session, will address the importance of HDR in video production. There will be an introduction to HDR, how it is being used in anime and how it can push the limits of motion in video production. These sessions should highlight how 4K and UHD are not interchangeable terms, and that resolution is just part of the picture with HDR playing an important role in UHD, according to HPA president Seth Hallen, who will host the “Intro to HDR” session.

“UHD implies not only resolution, but other things such as HDR and its wider color gamut,” said Hallen, who is also head of global strategy and business development at Pixelogic. “Studies have shown that the human brain can detect a greater range of light to dark than it can picture resolution. HDR thus is a massive improvement for overall picture quality. But it can also ensure that the content is delivered as closely as possible to the filmmaker’s intent. Hopefully the consumer will appreciate that.”

None of that is to say that resolution isn’t important, and even as 4K content is only now starting to pick up steam the industry is clearly looking ahead to what the next generation—8K—can offer. Pete Putman of ROAM Consulting will host two sessions, as well as take part in a breakfast roundtable—firstly offering his thoughts on HDMI 2.1 and Display-Port before providing an overview of products in the world of consumer electronics that were introduced at the recent 2019 CES in Las Vegas. Putman will then dive into what we can expect in 8K in 2019 and beyond in the session, “8K: Whoa! How’d We Get There So Quickly?”

“The 8K talk will be an overview of everything from cameras to displays, based on current information,” said Putman, who will discuss various aspects of the technology including appropriate codecs for compression and data transfer rates. “It should bring people up to speed on just how fast 8K is coming to market.”

TAKING IT ON THE ROAD AND BRINGING IT HOME

Mark Chiolis, director of business development for the Mobile TV Group will host Thursday’s “Remote and Mobile Production Panel,” which will discuss the changing world of remote production that now includes not only live sports and concerts for broadcasters, but addresses how this is fitting into the world of streaming services and the growing eGames/eSports market.

“With so many live events you start out with a blank canvas and the set up for a production crew is very tight,” said Chiolis. “We’ll discuss the whole gamut of what is involved in preparing for a live production and what we’ve seen come out in 2018 and what we expect to help with productions in the next couple of years. Part of the discussion will include the role of REMI applications [REMote Integration], IP workflows, virtual productions and of course, eSports. It should be an exciting time for live production.”

Thanks to larger TV screens with greater resolution joined by surround sound systems, seeing movies at home has gotten closer to what filmmakers have intended, and this aspect of what the viewer actually sees will be discussed in “Downstream Image Presentation Management for Consumer Displays.” Moderated by Michael Chambliss of International Cinematographers Guild, the session will feature Steven Poster of the American Society of Cinematographers as a panelist.

“We, as the ASC, started participating at the HPA Tech Retreat seven years ago, and at the time we were asked why we were here,” said Poster. “Now they have asked us to give our presentation, which we see as important as it discusses the importance of the creative intent of the filmmaker.”

That intent of what the director and cinematographer has improved a lot from the days when movies were in essence “butchered” via pan and scan, but today even with HDR and greater picture resolution, there still needs to be more progress. Poster, who first formed a technology committee when he was ASC president 20 years ago, had a vision whereby the TV set could ensure that the picture is up to the standards of the filmmaker. However, he admitted that the technology wasn’t quite there at the time.

Now two and a half decades later that is finally becoming a reality.

“Our TV set technology has become quite good,” said Chambliss. “So why can’t we have a little bit of metadata that is used in the production making it way to the sets. So far Netflix and Sony have implemented what is called calibrated modes so that the set closely mirrors the monitors we used in the production. Instead of leaving this in a 1950s ‘it is up to the viewer to adjust the set,’ the smart TVs could optimize the picture. The sets are capable of doing this, so let’s automate the process.”

CAPTIONING AND SUBTITLES

Subtitling and captioning will get its moment in the spotlight at the Retreat with “IMSC 1.1: A Single Subtitle and Caption Format for the Entertainment Chain,” hosted by Pierre-Anthony Lemieux of Sandflow Consulting.

Lemieux will highlight IMSC, the W3C standard for worldwide subtitles/captions, which came about as the result of an international collaboration—the initial version of which was published in 2016.

“Technology has made it possible, along with flexible delivery for subtitles and captions to be provided in so much more content,” said Lemieux. “It has been in the broadcast world where the United States was the exception for providing subtitles for the hearing impaired, but worldwide there have been little mandates for accessibility. But that is changing.”

In addition, thanks to streaming services—notably Netflix, which provides content from international markets—as well as changing viewing habits, subtitles and captions are becoming much more important.

“Even people that aren’t hard of hearing are enjoying content in bed late at night or on buses and airplanes and having the sound on isn’t an option, so captions are necessary for the message to be conveyed,” added Lemieux. “It is easy to forget that just 10 years ago subtitles were literally burned on a film with a laser in France, and that was an expensive and difficult process. Today technology—notably IMSC—has made it easy for subtitles to be added to the content. Subtitles and captions were an afterthought, but now in the world of audio/video production these will be first class citizens.”

Predicting everything that attendees will see would be akin to looking into the future, said Mark Schubin, program chair at the HPA. “There’s a wild array of possibilities on both the acquisition and presentation ends. How do we deal with the new world?”

For more information, visithpaonline.

NEVADA CITY, CALIF. –Telestream announced that its entire suite of captioning, workflow automation and QC products are ready to meet the latest FCC captioning rules. As of July 1, 2017, clips of all live (e.g. concerts, sporting events and news) or near-live programming (e.g. late night talk shows) that are captioned on TV must now be also captioned when posted online.

The new FCC rules now require broadcasters, programmers and content creators to caption video clips within 8 to 12 hours of programming shown live or near-live on television (such as news or sporting events) when these clips are delivered via Internet.

“Due to the tight turnaround time and high volume of content, manual preparation of these files is impractical. The only way to effectively turn around volumes of news and sports programming captions to OTT platforms is to rely on tools that automate the process,” explains Giovanni Galvez, product manager for Captioning & Subtitling at Telestream.

Telestream’s media processing and captioning solutions, including Vantage Timed Text Flip, Lightspeed Live Capture and Vidchecker, allow for completely automated conversion and delivery of FCC-compliant captioned video files for the Internet. These tools allow broadcasters to capture and begin processing live programs as they’re being broadcast.

Media organizations can use the Vantage Media Processing Platform and Timed Text Flip to transcode captions and subtitles within a single workflow. Vantage can both transcode the file to the necessary formats for OTT delivery, and handle the proper conversion of the master video files such as MXF, MPEG-2, GXF or ProRes with captioning.

Telestream captioning solutions are able to get live captioned programming to OTT platforms, and have complete international delivery capabilities. All Telestream captioning solutions can handle TTML, IMSC 1.0, SMPTE 2052 Timed Text, and Web VTT files. Telestream software can also export embedded captioning into .mp4 files for OTT delivery.

QC tools such as Telestream Vidchecker ensure that proper captions are embedded in the incoming/source file, and those same tools offer proof that captions are present before delivery to OTT platforms.

For organizations who wish to create captions and subtitles in-house, Telestream’s MacCaption and CaptionMaker captioning software simplify video captioning and subtitling in any digital workflow. MacCaption and CaptionMaker each have easy-to-use user interfaces and features that are designed to automate much of the cumbersome captioning creation process as possible. When used together with the Vantage family of video transcoding and workflow automation solutions, Telestream’s captioning products provide a solution to transcode, convert, troubleshoot, modify, and deploy caption data alongside video – regardless of the delivery platform.

SAN BRUNO, CALIF.—YouTube’s captioning service has reached a milestone, with the company announcing that it has captioned 1 billion videos for the benefit of viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing.

YouTube began using automated caption services in 2009. The site combined Google’s automatic speech recognition technology with its own caption system to offer automatic caption of videos. With the addition of machine learning algorithms, expanding of training data and other tools to improve speech recognition, YouTube reports that it has increased its accuracy for automatic captions in English by 50 percent.

In YouTube’s blog post announcing the milestone, the site said that it will continue to improve caption accuracy and hopes to expand its automatic caption services for all ten of the languages it supports, including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—The Deaf Professional Artists Network has gone with Telestream’s MacCaption closed captioning software to provide the in-house closed captioning and subtitling services to DPAN.TV. The network, which is aimed at the deaf and hard of hearing community, produces original video series covering a wide range of topics that are available with either American Sign Language or caption services.

With the MacCaption, the DPAN.TV staff can import a transcript of a video from a plain text file or teleprompter copy. Editing and correcting captions can be made in a similar way to a word processor. Captions are then automatically synchronized with the video and can be encoded into TV and internet video formats like MP4, MOV and MXF.

DPAN.TV was founded by Sean Forbes and Joel Martin 10 years ago.

LA CROSSE, WIS.—Comprompter News and Automation is getting ready to release a new voice captioning software, the Caption Central Multi. This live captioning voice system is designed to support up to eight users in the same session, i.e. dual anchors, round table discussions and in-studio interviews.

The Caption Central Mutli features a Speech Engine that synchronizes to the spoken words within a reported two seconds of the time they are spoken. The software also identifies the name and title of the speaker. Spell-checking and context checking are used to select the most appropriate word when a conflict arises. Additional features include built-in 30 second voice training; a more than 300,000 word dictionary; the creation of custom vocabulary or common names, words and phrases;

Comprompter will offer the Caption Central Multi in either a four or eight speaker server system in a 4RU rack-mounted case with LAN switch, a USB serial adaptor and XLR to USB audio adaptor.

JACKSON, MO.—Link Electronics is providing users with a standalone device that allows for true IP audio and IP captioning with its new LEI-592P IP processor. System functions include allowing a serial captioning encoder to become an IP captioning encoder, enabling the removal of the traditional two phone line set-up, connecting to an encoder via serial RS232, and sending audio over its Ethernet port, while receiving caption data into the Ethernet port.

LEI-592P includes a data LED to indicate that it is receiving or sending data through the Ethernet. An LED is also available to indicate audio presence and audio clipping. Additional features include a user selectable baud rates of 1200, 2400 and 9600, 8-N-1 or 7-0-1 type serial data, a standard 3.5 stereo headphone jack, and Ethernet port for broadband connection.

Audio is sampled at 16 kHz. Latency of the audio, which is less than 200ms plus the latency of the internet, can be adjusted through the system’s audio player. Serial and audio data is sent through two serial tunnels connected to the captioner.

Users can receive audio to their computer by using a LEI-592P player available through Link Electronics’ website. The audio output device can be selected by the user through the player software, as well as volume control. IP address, port numbers, encryption and password security can also be set up via the web.

LA CROSSE, WIS.—The latest version of Comprompter News and Automation’s Caption Central voice captioning software has been released. Utilizing a new Speech Engine, Caption Central v2.3 provides fast and accurate live voice captioning, with synchronization to the spoken words within two seconds, per Comprompter’s press release.

Features of the updated system include built-in voice training; dictionary containing nearly 300,000 words according to Comprompter; ability to build custom vocabulary of common words and phrases in a particular market. The system can also perform a context check to select the most appropriate word when spelling issues arise.

Comprompter specializes in news and automation software for the broadcast and cable industry.

JACKSON, MO.—Link Electronics has developed the LEI-590 closed caption generator and decoder for inserting open caption into live events. The system accepts standard 608 caption data or text data via an IP interface, then generates open captions from that caption data and outputs the video with open captions.

Users can recover data through IP interface with the LEI-590, as well as decode the input SDI video with embedded closed captioning from either VBI (line 21/21) or VAC (SMPTE 334Caption Data Packet). Captions are then burnt into outgoing HD/SD-SDI streams and appear as “open” captions during video. Decoded captions data can then be sent to the Ethernet port for “data recovery” for monitoring, to make a caption file, or decode another stream. There is also an “easy caption deletion” feature to delete VBI and 708VANC closed captions from the output video.

In addition, Link Electronics says the latency between the open and closed captions is minimalized, and the V-chip icon can be inserted by LEI-590 onto active video with insertion options that include continuous, timed display, or GPI controlled.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson continues to expand its services down under, announcing that it has closed a multi-year contract with the Commonwealth of Australia to provide live captioning services for the Australian Parliament. Ericsson will provide captioning services for all sitting hours within the Senate, House of Representatives, Federation Chamber and Parliamentary Committee hearings recorded as video.

In the last year Ericsson has set up a number of contracts in Australia to provide captioning services, including a multi-year deal with Australian public service broadcasters ABC and SBS in March, and Australian news service provider ANC in November 2015. The company also reached a deal with the New Zealand Parliament in June.

The service is scheduled to go live in August and will be available through the Australian Parliament’s online service.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson has been tapped to assist the New Zealand Parliament, signing an exclusive, multi-year access services contract with the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives to remotely deliver live captioning services for Parliament TV. The new captioning service will be available starting in August.

According to David Wilson, clerk of the House of Representatives, one in nine New Zealanders uses captions when watching TV. “As a result, live captioning will enable more people in our communities to be informed about and involved in the work of their Parliament,” Wilson said.

Ericsson reports that this is the first instance that it will provide its captioning services to New Zealand. Throughout the last year, the company has signed multiple deals with stations in New Zealand’s neighbor Australia for captioning services.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson and BBC R&D recently collaborated on new technology that is designed to address the latency of live captioning for television. What the two companies came up with reportedly minimizes live caption delays with the audio they match up with by utilizing the time needed to compress audio and video streams for transmission and distribution.

With captions taking less time to encode, the new technology uses a compensating delay to ensure pre-prepared captions that are synchronized with the audio. The compensating delay can be decreased during live broadcasts to further reduce any delay.

The platform is able to support live captioning in a number of languages, according to Ericsson, by using speech-to-text, newsroom integration and rapid offline content preparation.

BBC plans to roll out the new technology across its channels over the summer. Ericsson also plans to offer the service to additional clients around the world.

JACKSON, MO.—Link Electronics has introduced its CBE-493 3GB/HD/SD-SDI captioning bridge and encoder. The third unit in Link’s Chameleon series, and nicknamed “The Bridge,” CBE-493 is capable of taking captions from a SD input and encode them onto an HD input, or vice versa. It can also re-encode captions after they have been removed by another device.

CEA-608 captions from the bridge input are transcoded to CEA-708 captions; both 608 and 708 captions and then wrapped into a Caption Data Packet. The CDP is then embedded into the encoder output. CBE-493 outputs two closed caption encoded outputs of the same format as input with an option to decode one output.

The new system features four communication ports, including two serial RS-232 ports with adjustable baud rates and two ports that are tunneled to an Ethernet connector. This allows the CBE-493 to host two IP connections at one address. A menu is also available to allow users to resend or redirect data from the Ethernet port to the serial ports.

Additional features include re-clocked SDI outputs to perform re-clocking Distribution Amplifiers; field configuration from the front panel; XDS packet menus for V-chips and Transmission Station Identification; a GPI remote. The new unit also has the ability to raise the lower four lines up to the top four lines in order to comply with FCC mandates.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson signed a pair of contracts with Australian public service broadcasters ABC and SBS for multi-year captioning services.

The deal with ABC is a new contract to deliver live and file-based captioning across ABC’s television network, which includes ABC, ABC2, ABC3, and ABC News 24. The deal with SBS is an extension of the two companies’ partnership for an additional three years.

These deals are in addition to the contract that the company signed with ANC, Australia’s24-hour multi-channel, multi-platform news service, back in November.