BRANSON, Mo.—Link Electronics has partnered with Aberdeen Broadcast Services to provide a real-time, dual-stream translation and captioning service.

Using advanced Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automated Machine Translation (AMT), and AI, the low-latency service is fast and efficient. Aberdeen measures contextual accuracy, not simply word-for-word transcription, Link Electronics said.

Drawing on years of testing and refinement with human editors, Aberdeen’s ASR delivers greater than 98% contextual accuracy. A wide range of languages are available.

The service is accomplished over IP connections for ease and economy. In addition to embedding captions and translations, the cloud-based service can simultaneously send out real-time translations with authentic voice dubs and captions to personal devices for in-person audiences, it said.

The process is simple and effective. A broadcast stream is sent through an SDI connection to a Link Orion caption encoder, which then relays the audio via an IP connection to the Aberdeen ASR cloud server.

Using advanced AI with ASR and AMT technology, Aberdeen’s cloud server processes the audio to generate synchronized captions and translations in the primary and secondary languages, returning them to the Orion encoder over the same IP connection. The Orion then embeds the caption data back into the SDI stream with either open (burned-in) captions or closed (encoded) captions.

The combination of Aberdeen’s capability to push out a primary and secondary translation and captioning, combined with Orion’s ability to receive them and encode them on CC1 and CC3, makes the process seamless, the company said.

Aberdeen can also send real-time captions and translations to personal devices for in-person audiences.

Using the same workflow as using a live writer, ASR delivers high accuracy and contextual awareness with significant savings. Routing the audio stream through AMT produces real-time subtitles in multiple languages, natural-sounding audio dubs with voice options for gender and tone, and synchronized playback that matches the tempo of the original speaker.

More information is available on the Link Electronics website.

Closed captioning (CC) is a text display on video content that helps deaf and hearing-impaired audiences understand speech. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission requires TV producers to supply on-screen text of spoken words, sounds, and music on their video programs. Other countries require CC and demand accurate, synchronous, timely, complete,and properly placed closed captions similar to the U.S.

TV producers must comply with FCC regulations, so they are currently the responsible party for providing CC in their programming. According to the World Health Organization, one in 10 people struggle with hearing loss or deafness, so captions definitely help a lot of people and have a purpose.

The demand for CC is valid and inclusive to hearing-impaired people, and I even find CC helpful to understand what I’m watching when I need to keep the volume low for any reason. However, behind the scenes, adding captions isn’t magic, and it presents challenges.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the government that introduced captioning. A few networks in the 1970s began offering captions, and it piqued the interest of hearing-impaired advocacy groups. By the mid-1990s, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, initiating mandates on video content creators to provide captions and threatening penalties for non-compliance.

In tandem, the FCC also required TV manufacturers to install CC display technology for viewers to toggle captions on or off. Since then, broadcasters have endured the task of making sure captions reach viewers.

Generating Closed Captions
Several options exist for generating captions. Even to this day, typists listen in and transcribe speech in real time during live programs or recordings. Captioning service providers like Aberdeen, VITAC, 3Play and Rev charge producers by the hour for their typists. The captioner dials in over a phone line or an IP connection and types away. Hardware and software embed the captions within the video signal, and the entire video system post CC embedding must handle passing captions down the line and out the door during transmission.

Some broadcast equipment vendors, like ENCO, Audimus and AI Media, offer CC solutions in the form of automated captioning hardware that utilizes voice encoders or AI voice recognition software.

One of my roles as a broadcast professional is serving as the liaison between the CC service provider and my company. A lot of pressure to produce accurate and consistent captions came from upper management because CC is a government-regulated requirement.

Vice presidents and legal teams feared the FCC would crack down on any failure to comply. Interruptions did occur when using a live typist due to poor connection, hardware failures, the typist’s skill level, latency drift and other oddities. Ensuring compliance with FCC regulations caused a lot of stress and was costly in both infrastructure for video systems that pass CC and the bills incurred using typists.

We researched automated captioning technology despite knowing they weren’t as accurate as typists. Eventually, we acquired automated ENCO enCaption devices, which proved to provide consistency during testing. The dependability of on-site hardware that provides seamless and consistent captioning meant more than sticking with a typist. CC from a typist appears on screen much better than automated systems, but I can honestly say that caption management became a stressor of the past since we implemented voice recognition hardware.

Now, with so much AI technology and automated captioners on the market, it begs the question as to whether or not broadcasters and content providers should still be responsible for producing captions in the first place. Automated captioning still costs money to acquire and maintain, as well as the fact that most vendors only license so many hours per unit. If the burden of providing captions to audiences fell elsewhere, it would be welcomed by most production houses.

Voice Recognition Technology Disruption
Newer technology always disrupts the market. Industries endure creative destruction all the time, which is what occurs when innovation disrupts the market and causes some businesses to rise and others to fall. Voice recognition software is currently disrupting the marketplace and influencing consumer behavior.

Thanks to AI and tech developers, voice recognition technology has come a long way and grosses billions in revenue while showing promising growth. The digital era, with streaming and web viewing, enables viewers to see captions easily thanks to AI-assist bots. In fact, TV manufacturers already install voice encoders in remotes for viewers to control their TV. Installing hardware in TVs that auto-captions what people watch seems like a logical next step for applying voice recognition tech.

The disruption has nudged many to adopt the tech, and it’s pushing the industry into new territory. Global Growth Insights reported that nearly 40% of content creators use AI or automated captioning devices, and that number is trending to increase. Video consumption and production both show signs of rising, and thanks to more affordable ways of obtaining equipment and delivering video, many small-time producers can join the industry.

Smaller content creators may get discouraged as they experience the challenges and costs of complying with FCC regulations. Arguably, AI software and automated captioners may offer more affordable means to generate captions, but if the FCC changed its rules to require TV manufacturers to install voice recognition hardware rather than the content creator, then the headache and costs placed on producers would vanish.

Should the Responsibility Shift?
It’s time for broadcasters to recognize the disruption and advocate for change and settle into a new norm. Groups like the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and large media companies influence what rules and requirements the FCC crafts.

The FCC then relies on congressional oversight to approve regulations. Broadcasters could galvanize behind the idea to shift responsibility to TV and mobile device manufacturers. Due to voice recognition advancements and market disruption, NAB and other groups could influence the FCC and Congressional leadership to change the rules to loosen or remove the requirement.

The disruption might cause a revenue hit to CC service providers. But maybe not. Companies that manufacture voice encoders could start partnering with TV and mobile device manufacturers to supply them with audio encoders. It may even expand their revenue streams because instead of selling just a few encoders to a few hundred production houses, they could expand by selling millions of devices for every TV that needs one installed.

Additionally, captioning typists could shift into roles assisting automated caption developers to improve their recognition software. Instead of charging to type, they could charge to consult. Because of the multitude of experiences that human typists have, typists could improve AI models’ ability to decipher and transcribe speech and audio.

Conclusion
Closed captioning really offers a great experience for hearing-impaired viewers and should remain a staple of video consumption. However, the responsible party for providing captions may need to shift, along with the FCC regulations. Rather than video content producers, TV and mobile device manufacturers could begin installing voice recognition hardware.

CC embedding and visibility would occur downstream of production. Thanks to advancements in technology, market adjustments can happen, and government agencies may need to modify their regulations to better align with market conditions. In that new scenario, broadcasters would save money and remove the legal requirements from their shoulders, enabling them to focus primarily on producing content.

What do you think? We welcome your feedback. Email us at tvtechnology@futurenet.com

BRANSON, Mo.—Link Electronics has unveiled the Gemini Dual Caption Encoder, a next-generation captioning solution for broadcasters and institutions.

By enabling two caption encoders to connect through a single Ethernet port, the Gemini reduces rack space, streamlines network connections and offers a cost-effective means to manage multiple streams.

The Gemini is a 3G/HD/SD-SDI closed caption encoder equipped with six versatile communication ports (two each of Ethernet, RS232 and USB) and the ability to deliver captions over IP. It accepts two simultaneous 3G/HD/SD-SDI data streams, providing each input with two caption-encoded outputs of the same format, one of which can be decoded, the company said.

With reclocked SDI outputs that surpass the performance of many distribution amplifiers, the Gemini ensures signal quality that exceeds industry standards while preserving ANC data, including audio, it said.

The Gemini was engineered to serve a wide variety of environments, including broadcast studios, educational institutions, houses of worship, postproduction facilities and government organizations.

It allows two captioners to send data independently to separate SDI streams or a single captioner to feed both, ensuring maximum workflow efficiency. The system also allows the audio from the primary SDI stream to function as a USB microphone, creating opportunities for seamless integration with platforms like Zoom or speech-recognition software, Link said.

With eight GPI controls, four per stream, the Gemini makes it simple to stay compliant with Federal Communications Commission mandates and respond quickly to dynamic broadcast needs. Operators can switch between encode modes, bypass encoding remotely, manage decode services and use the Weather Lift function to ensure captions never block key on-screen content. Built-in caption data recovery and decoded output features provide reliable quality monitoring, and a GUI connection allows users to remotely access and control the unit, it said.

Supporting both line 21/22 CTA-608 waveform and SMPTE 334 Caption Data Packet (CDP), the Gemini handles SD and HD encoding. Its XDS packet capability includes Parental Guidance (V-chip) and Transmission Station Identification (TSID), making it a comprehensive and future-proof tool for captioning professionals.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PARIS—Ateme, a provider of video compression, delivery, and streaming solutions, today announced it is leveraging Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities to automate large-scale, multilingual subtitle generation, a move Ateme says could drastically reduce costs and production times while enhancing content accessibility and value for audiences worldwide.

Ateme’s file transcoding application, TITAN File, is containerized as microservices and deployed through Google Kubernetes Engine. Media files stored in Google Cloud Storage are processed by Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s unified AI development platform. This distributed, flexible, and scalable infrastructure has allowed for a smooth transition and seamless integration into client workflows, according to Ateme.

“This innovation addresses a key challenge for content creators and distributors who have often been limited to translating content into a single language, thereby restricting international distribution and accessibility for non-English speaking or hearing-impaired audiences,” said Yohann Guilloux, VP Global Partnerships at Ateme.

“In the face of exploding content volumes, it’s no longer enough to have good technology: you have to be able to innovate quickly, at scale, and with the right partners,” said Jules Mermet-Husson, Cloud Solutions Architect at Ateme. “Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities enable us to automate what was once a challenging process. Together, we are building an agile, open, and scalable platform that transforms every technical constraint into an opportunity for value creation.“

Over the past several years, there has been a surge in interest and demand for non-English video content. Viewership is booming, especially among younger audiences in primarily English-speaking markets like the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.

In a recent study from Ampere Analysis, 54% of internet users in those markets reported watching international (i.e., non-English) TV and movies “very often” or “sometimes” — up from 43% five years ago. Likewise, 66% of 18-to-34-year-olds in those markets reported watching international content regularly. And, according to the report, the most popular way to consume that content was through subtitles.

These findings underscore just how important subtitles and captions have become. Delivering properly localized subtitles is now essential for making content accessible to a broader audience. Without a solid subtitling and captioning solution, broadcasters and video service providers risk being left behind in the race to secure viewers and keep them happy.

The Complexity of Implementing Proper Captions and Subtitles
International content presents a huge monetization opportunity for video service providers, but many say that the complexity of localized captioning makes it hard to capitalize on that opportunity.

Ensuring synchronization between audio and text is critical, as captions must match dialogue precisely to maintain clarity and viewer engagement. Synchronization is especially tough for multilingual or fast-paced content, where timing discrepancies can happen easily. Manual captioning is labor-intensive and error-prone, requiring multiple reviews to meet guidelines for accuracy, completeness, and display metrics.

Additionally, captions must be carefully placed to avoid obscuring important on-screen visuals, often necessitating frame-by-frame inspection or advanced object detection. Translating humor, idioms, and cultural references and nuances further complicates the process. Literal translations can fail to capture the intended meaning, requiring nuanced adaptation so that audiences can relate.

Finally, complying with varying regional accessibility and legal standards adds another layer of complexity. It can take up to 10 hours to caption one hour of video content manually, and even then, there’s no guarantee the captions will be compliant.

Automated Captioning for the Win
Automated, software-based captioning tools streamline the process by converting spoken language into text (speech to text), segmenting it appropriately, and ensuring captions are accurately timed and placed within the video frame. Modern systems are designed to maintain high standards of accuracy and synchronization, and they often include features for multilanguage support, error correction, and compliance checks. Such characteristics make these systems essential for today’s global and fast-paced video streaming environment.

These tools also perform comprehensive quality control checks, such as verifying reading speed, display duration, and caption segmentation, and can automatically adjust placement to avoid blocking important elements like scoreboards or faces. This level of precision ensures captions meet legal requirements, such as those set by the FCC in the U.S. or Ofcom in the U.K., and adhere to best practices for accessibility.

By automating much of the workflow, automated captioning systems significantly reduce captioning time and effort vs. manual processes. That 10-hour captioning task can now be completed in real time or near-real time, cutting production time by 40% to 50% and labor costs by 30% to 40%.

Automated captioning systems also consolidate tasks such as transcription, review, and compliance checks within a single interface, minimizing errors and streamlining collaboration between automated processes and human reviewers. This efficiency is crucial for delivering high-quality, accessible content quickly across multiple languages and formats.

How AI Improves the Process and Elevates the Viewer Experience
The latest captioning tools use AI-driven technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver superior results. ASR rapidly transcribes spoken audio into text, even in challenging conditions with background noise or diverse accents.

NLP further processes this text, interpreting context, idioms, slang, and tone to produce captions that are not only accurate but also natural and easy to read. These technologies also enable features like automatic speaker identification, punctuation correction, and the grouping of words into meaningful segments for improved readability.

AI and machine learning advancements have transformed captioning by enabling adaptive learning and multimodal analysis. For example, computer vision can detect faces, on-screen text, or important visual cues, allowing the system to reposition captions dynamically to avoid covering critical information.

Machine translation models, now enhanced with large language models, provide more context-aware and culturally appropriate translations, ensuring captions resonate with local audiences. Multimodal AI can also identify nonverbal cues, such as laughter or gestures, and incorporate them into captions, resulting in a richer and more immersive viewing experience.

As these systems process more data, their accuracy and adaptability continue to improve, reducing the need for manual intervention and ensuring consistent quality across diverse content.

Cultural Sensitivity: It’s About More Than Translation
When it comes to captions and subtitles, cultural resonance and compliance with local standards can determine a title’s success. Today's mainstream translation engines excel at converting languages. As sophisticated large language models become fully integrated into readily available translation engines and captioning tools, they will be able to natively incorporate deep cultural sensitivity too.

That means AI-driven captioning solutions are poised to go far beyond simple translation. These future systems are expected to use contextual understanding to capture the subtleties of language — such as humor, sayings, and regional expressions — that are essential for truly authentic localization.

The aim is for these advanced solutions to one day adapt captions to align with local customs, regulatory requirements, and viewer expectations, ensuring content is not only accessible but also culturally relevant and accurate. This includes adjusting translations to preserve the original intent and tone, moving beyond literal word-for-word rendering.

As these more nuanced AI capabilities mature and become integrated into common tools, human expertise will remain indispensable. Human reviewers will play a vital role in guiding, validating, and finessing AI-generated captions, ensuring they accurately reflect the necessary subtle nuances and meet cultural appropriateness standards.

By combining the emerging power of AI for cultural adaptation with diligent human oversight, the next generation of captioning tools will be better equipped to help global audiences experience content as intended, fostering inclusion and engagement across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Conclusion
Advanced captioning tools enable providers to meet diverse audience needs, ensure accessibility, and deliver culturally relevant content efficiently and accurately for every viewer everywhere. They expand the reach of regional content and boost international connectivity through video, making them essential for success in the global streaming market.

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.

BOULDER, Colo.—Public Media Venture Group (PMVG) has announced that it is now providing real-time translation of closed captioning from English to Spanish on PMVG’s NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) test bed station in Cookeville, Tennessee.

The initiative, which illustrates the capabilities of NextGen TV broadcasters to offer new services and expand available audiences, is a collaboration among DigiCAP, XL8, PMVG, the Korean Radio Promotion Association (RAPA) and PBS station WCTE.

The translation solution detects English closed captions within a television program and translates them into a selected language using an AI-powered translation engine operated by XL8. The translated closed captions are then multiplexed back to the program stream and broadcast over PMVG’s NextGen TV station in Cookeville. While the LiveCAP service offers translation to many different languages, the current initiative in Cookeville focuses on Spanish.

“It has always been the mission of public broadcasters to serve all members of their communities,” Marc Hand, president and founder of PVMG, explained. “Captioning has extended the reach of public broadcasters to hearing-impaired viewers but has—until now—only been available in English.

This new service will extend the benefits of closed captions to households where English is not the primary language.”

The translation engine incorporated into LiveCAP is provided by XL8, a Silicon Valley tech firm that is a leader in the translation field. According to Tim Jung, CEO of XL8: “Whenever human language is involved, there will be variables from specific regions or topics. The XL8 translation engine uses a combination of AI and machine learning to enable translations that can take into account local language variations. This is ideal for broadcasters who operate in unique local environments.”

The LiveCAP system uses features built into NextGen TV sets and receivers. That means consumers don't need additional hardware if they have an ATSC 3.0 receiver; they simply use the set’s accessibility menu to switch captions to a different language.

Integration of the LiveCAP system into the NextGen TV content stream is provided by DigiCAP, an ATSC 3.0 gateway supplier. “Language translation for television closed captions is not new. But LiveCAP’s use of cutting-edge large language model technology for translating captioning of ATSC 3.0 broadcasts provides highly accurate translations at a fraction of the cost of human translation,” DigiCAP Senior Vice President Joonyoung Park said. “This has the potential to expand the use of translated closed captions to new television audiences.”

To see LiveCAP in action, viewers can tune into WCTE PBS channel 35 (W35DZ-D) and select Spanish-language captioning for the primary WCTE channel (CH 35.1).

Comprised of 32 leading public-media organizations, PMVG develops scalable technology use cases to help sustain public media’s vital services in the long term.

“Many public broadcasters operate in multilingual communities where closed-caption translations could make programming accessible to more viewers,” PMVG’s Hand said. “We are excited that PMVG’s ATSC 3.0 testbed in Cookeville is where technology is being developed to extend the reach of public broadcasters to audiences that speak a variety of languages.”

In the chambers of the Nebraska State Legislature, where accuracy and accessibility of public discourse are paramount, a quiet change has taken place through Legislative Bill 254. This legislation catalyzed the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology that seamlessly integrates closed captioning and real-time translation services for legislative hearings. Achieving an unprecedented 99% accuracy rate, the system has transformed a traditionally resource-intensive process into an efficient, automated solution.

The success of this AI solution in Nebraska's legislative and public-media environment demonstrates a pivotal shift in capability and accessibility. The system adeptly handles complex legislative language, technical terminology and multiple streams simultaneously, not just improving existing processes but fundamentally reimagining how public discourse can be documented and disseminated.

This is just one example of the rapidly evolving landscape of media ecology, where AI is emerging as a transformative force, reshaping not just how content is created but fundamentally altering the ecology of television as a medium. It constitutes a profound shift in the relationship between creators, content and viewers.

This evolution demands a critical examination through the lens of media ecology, considering not only the efficiencies gained but also the broader implications for communication, creativity and culture in an era where the boundaries between human and machine creativity are increasingly blurred.

The Historical Context of Technological Evolution in Television
The television industry has always been shaped by technological advancements, from live broadcasts to recorded shows to the revolution of digital editing. Each shift has not only changed production methods, but has also reshaped viewer expectations and the very operational aspects of televisual communication.

The move from black and white to color television transformed not just the visual experience, but the entire approach to set design, costume choices and visual storytelling. Similarly, the advent of digital editing freed creators from the physical constraints of film cutting, enabling more complex narratives and visual styles that would have been impractical or impossible in earlier eras.

AI represents the next frontier in this ongoing evolution, offering solutions across the entire production workflow while raising important questions about the nature of creativity and authenticity in media creation. Unlike previous technological advances that primarily enhanced or simplified existing processes, AI has the potential to fundamentally reimagine how content is conceptualized, created and consumed. This transformation occurs within a broader context of media convergence where the distinctions between different forms of media are increasingly fluid, and content must be adaptable across multiple platforms and formats.

The Transformation of Pre-Production: Creative Implications and Challenges
In preproduction, AI tools are already transforming traditional processes, introducing both exciting possibilities and complex challenges. Programs analyze vast datasets to suggest plotlines and may even predict audience reactions, accelerating the scriptwriting process.

These tools can process and synthesize enormous amounts of existing content, identifying successful narrative patterns and helping writers avoid common pitfalls. However, this efficiency comes with important considerations about the homogenization of storytelling. When AI systems trained on existing content influence creative decisions, we must question whether this constrains the diversity of narratives or inadvertently reinforces existing tropes and biases.

The role of AI in casting and talent selection also raises intriguing questions about representation and diversity in television. AI systems can analyze audience demographics and preferences to suggest casting choices, but this data-driven approach may inadvertently perpetuate existing biases or prioritize proven formulas over novel choices that could expand representation in media.

The Evolution of Production: Redefining Craftsmanship and Authenticity
The capturing process itself is undergoing a radical transformation through AI-driven camera work and lighting automation. While these advancements offer unprecedented precision and consistency, they also alter the traditional relationship between cinematographers and their craft.

As an AI camera assistant’s perfect movements and framing, we must consider what is gained—and potentially lost—when human intuition is augmented or replaced by algorithmic decision-making. The art of cinematography has long been celebrated for its ability to convey emotion and narrative through subtle choices in framing, movement and lighting. As AI systems become more sophisticated in replicating and optimizing these choices, the nature of visual storytelling expertise may shift from technical mastery to the ability to effectively direct and curate AI-generated options.

The integration of virtual sets and augmented reality, facilitated by AI, further blurs the line between the real and the virtual, potentially changing viewers' perception of visual authenticity. This technology enables the creation of complex, fantastic environments that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive to create physically.

However, it also raises questions about the value and meaning of authenticity in television production. As viewers become more aware of the prevalence of AI-enhanced and virtual environments, their relationship with television as a medium may evolve, potentially affecting the suspension of disbelief that has been crucial to television's storytelling power.

Postproduction Revolution: The Changing Nature of Editing and Artistic Expression
Postproduction, traditionally a realm of painstaking human craftsmanship, is being revolutionized by AI-powered tools that automate editing, enhance visual effects and optimize sound design. Platforms now offer AI features that can analyze footage, suggest cuts and even predict viewer engagement.

This automation of creative decisions raises profound questions about the nature of artistic expression in the digital age. As AI handles increasingly sophisticated aspects of post-production, the role of human editors and artists evolves from craftspeople to curators of AI-generated options.

This shift has significant implications for the pacing and rhythm of content. AI editing systems, trained on vast databases of successful shows, may optimize for maximum engagement, potentially creating a new standard for televisual rhythm that prioritizes algorithmic perfection over human intuition or artistic choice. While this could lead to more consistently engaging content, it may also result in a homogenization of editing styles and pacing across different genres and formats.

The impact on visual effects is equally profound. AI-powered tools can now generate complex visual effects with minimal human input, democratizing access to high-quality VFX. This democratization could lead to more visually ambitious productions from smaller studios or independent creators, potentially diversifying the television landscape. However, it also raises questions about the value of human expertise in visual effects creation and the potential loss of the artisanal quality that has characterized much of television's visual evolution.

The Audience-Content Relationship: A New Paradigm
The impact of AI extends beyond the production process to reshape the relationship between content and audience. Predictive analytics powered by AI can forecast viewer reactions before a show is even produced, potentially influencing creative decisions.

This feedback loop between AI-driven audience insights and content creation represents a significant shift in how television communicates with its audience. As content becomes more data-driven, we must consider the implications for storytelling diversity and the potential for AI to either broaden or narrow the scope of televisual expression.

The use of AI in real-time content adaptation presents another frontier in content production. Systems that can analyze viewer engagement and emotional responses in real time could enable the creation of adaptive content that adjusts its narrative, pacing or even ending based on audience reaction. While this level of personalization might enhance viewer engagement, it also raises important questions about the nature of shared cultural experiences and the role of television in shaping collective narratives.

Distribution and Accessibility: Democratization and Its Discontents
In the realm of distribution, AI is transforming how content reaches viewers, with algorithms determining not just technical aspects like compression and encoding, but also personalized content recommendations.

This algorithmic mediation of viewing choices raises important questions about audience autonomy and the filter bubbles that may be created when AI systems curate our media experiences. The democratization of AI-powered production tools may also disrupt traditional gatekeeping structures, potentially allowing for more diverse voices while simultaneously challenging established quality standards.

The ability of AI to optimize content for different platforms and viewing contexts also raises questions about the integrity of the creative vision. When content is automatically adapted for various screen sizes, aspect ratios, and viewing durations, how does this affect the artistic intention and the viewer's experience?

The Future of Television in an AI-Mediated World
As we navigate this AI-driven transformation of content production, it's crucial to maintain a critical perspective that goes beyond technological determinism. We must consider its broader impact on media ecology—the entire environment of human communication and perception.

In this new era, success will likely belong to those who can effectively collaborate with AI systems while maintaining a strong creative vision and understanding of human storytelling. As we move forward, the goal should be to use AI as a means to expand the possibilities of television as a medium for human expression and connection. The true potential of AI in content production may lie not in its ability to replicate or replace human creativity, but in its capacity to augment and inspire it, opening new avenues for storytelling and artistic expression.

NOVI, Mich.—ENCO will debut its first closed-caption encoder during the 2024 NAB Show New York, Oct. 9-10, at the Jacob Javits Center in New York.

The homegrown DoCaption EN848 is now shipping and available separately or as part of ENCO’s enCaption system, giving customers an immediate on-prem or cloud option for fast, automated conversion and delivery of captions and translations, the company said.

The availability of the EN848 allows broadcasters to deploy the system over their IP network, with connectivity to enCaption for cloud-based captioning services such as those offered by ENCO partner VITAC.

The EN848’s dual connectivity options also allow broadcasters to deploy redundant captioning workflows with immediate failover from cloud to on-prem if the network temporarily goes dark.

The solution’s core function is to reliably insert closed captions from any downstream source in compliance with global captioning standards. The EN848 positions ENCO upstream with a truly native solution and pairs the speed and accuracy of enCaption’s automatic conversion with a reliable 1RU solution that maintains broadcasters’ compliance as captions go live to air, it said.

The EN848 conforms to a broad range of closed-captioning specifications, including the encoding and insertion of CEA-608/CEA-708 and Teletext/OP47 ancillary data for standardized and legacy communication protocols, ENCO said.

“While compliance and reliability remain the core function of the closed caption encoder, the EN848 was developed with bigger aspirations in mind,” ENCO President Ken Frommert said.” The EN848 was purpose-built to natively pair with enCaption, removing the need for a third-party device and offer broadcasters a single source of support.”.

See ENCO at 2024 NAB Show New York booth 907

More information is available on the company’s website.

More information on VITAC is available here.

Viewers in English speaking countries—including the U.K., US, Australia and Canada—are viewing more non-English language film and TV shows in recent years, according to a new study from Ampere Analysis.

Regular viewing of international (non-English language) TV shows and movies has increased by 24% since the first quarter of 2020, among 18 to 64-year-olds in those countries. More than half (54%) of Internet users in these markets claimed to watch non-English language content “very often” or “sometimes”—up from 43% since the start of 2020. This is despite titles from primarily Anglophone markets like the U.S. typically making up the bulk of global streaming libraries, Ampere said.

Korean TV shows and movies have seen a 35% rise in frequent viewing in English-speaking markets in the last four years. Frequent viewing is up from 16% of 18 to 64-year-olds to 22% over the last four years, with titles including Squid Game and Parasite driving awareness of the high-quality shows and movies produced in South Korea. Netflix in particular has increased spend on TV shows and movies produced in South Korea.

Foreign language content is particularly popular among 18 to 34-year-olds in English-speaking markets, with 66% of this age group regularly watching. However, growth is strongest among older age groups, with frequent viewing increasing by more than one-third among 45 to 64-year-olds in the last four years (up from 30% to 41%). The move towards foreign language content consumption by older consumers reflects growth in the adoption of streaming services, which offer greater volumes of international content than their broadcast counterparts.

When it comes to how viewers watch foreign language content, subtitling is most popular. More than one-quarter (28%) of people in English-speaking markets enjoy watching this way. In comparison, just under one-fifth (19%) enjoy dubbing.

The situation in non-anglophone markets is different, however, according to the researcher. While growth in interest in foreign language content is minimal, there is already a high baseline willingness to watch international content—with 88% of consumers regularly engaging with foreign-language TV shows or films.

The way foreign language content is watched also differs in some markets. In France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, there is a strong preference for dubbing, which is reflected in the availability of dubbed content in these languages on video services. Yet while certain markets show preferences for dubbed content, others—like the Nordic territories and the Netherlands—have a strong preference for subtitling. Ampere says this reflects a mix of the lower historical availability of TV shows and movies dubbed into local languages, but also—in many cases—strong English-language skills.

“The increased viewing of international programming in English-speaking markets shows that as content producers diversify production regions, viewers are ready and willing to transform their viewing habits,” said Annabel Yeomans, Research Manager at Ampere Analysis. “This offers multiple advantages for streamers facing economic pressures. They can investigate markets with lower production costs and focus on productions in newer streaming markets to grow subscriptions while catering to their existing subscriber base. Developments in AI technology for subtitling and dubbing make it easier than ever for platforms to offer TV shows and movies on a global scale.”

Most broadcasters and content creators got their first taste of the potential of artificial intelligence from closed captioning (aka subtitling). Speech-to-text technology enabled by AI—something many of us already use in our daily lives—has been in use for more than a decade and improvements in its capabilities have become more evident, with far more accuracy in both transcribing as well as translating.

For broadcasters who have to comply with rigid FCC standards, however, the rules are explicit in terms of what type of content is covered as well as its accuracy and even placement on the screen. Vendors have responded to broadcasters’ needs with new tech that make the process more accurate and automated than ever. 

Voice Interaction
Voice Interaction, which began as a live captioning service in 2001 was among the first companies to incorporate AI-based closed captioning when it launched in 2008. Its services and products include automatic live closed captioning, speech transcription, spoken term detection and indexing, spoken language identification and speech analytics for actionable knowledge, compliance logging and broadcast monitoring.

The Portugal-based company has steadily increased its presence in North America, with Scripps and Nexstar among its U.S. customers, and Bell Canada, most of whom use its Audimus.Media platform, a broadcast-grade, AI-driven solution for real-time, automatic closed captioning across multiple platforms, including live TV broadcasting (OTT/OTA), streaming and online meetings. Its speech recognition capabilities extend to 40 languages, with simultaneous translation and speaker differentiation.

Renato Cassaca, chief software development engineer, says the company takes pride in its ability to quickly resolve issues that could result in mispronounced names or inaccurate information on the screen. 

“We have webcrawlers running 24 hours a day that get all the newspapers available online,” he said. “And we also get guest access to the newsroom computer system like AP’s ENPS or Avid iNnews—we have a permanent connection to those systems inside the TV stations and we collect all that data to improve their language models and every day they receive a retrained language model to cope with the changing reality.”

ENCO Systems
ENCO Systems has been a mainstay in the closed-caption market for years with its enCaption automated captioning platform, which it launched in 2010. Since then, AI has advanced far beyond its initial capabilities, and the company has focused on these advances. 

“We’ve been leveraging AI and machine learning for years to get better accuracy and quality out of speech to text,” said Ken Frommert, ENCO CEO for the Detroit-based company. 

“Our ASR [automated speech recognition] engine is actually better in certain situations than a human for live captioning or transcription. As AI has gotten better, it has allowed allowed broadcasters to offer live captioning at significantly less expense, which allows for more programming to be captioned, to not only meet FCC and other regulations  but also being able to leverage captions to search file-based transcriptions.”

(Read more: Captioning for Sports Broadcasting and Venues)

At the NAB Show, ENCO rolled out enCaption5, a cloud-native, microservices-based solution, which adds new features and flexibility such as a caption editor to view and refine the results of offline or previous live transcriptions. enCaption 5 can now add captions to both live and pre-recorded content in 48 languages, combining machine learning with advanced speech-to-text conversion and grammatical structure analysis to deliver exceptional accuracy with extremely low latency. enCaption also now incorporates ENCO’s enTranslate systems as a plug-in.

It also launched AITrack and ENCO-GPT, which leverages the ChatGPT model to generate language responses from text-based queries added to automated TV and radio production workflows. Initially targeting radio, AITrack integrates with ENCO’s DAD radio automation system to generate and insert voice tracks between songs. ENCO-GPT simplifies copy creation within TV and radio broadcasts and program streams and can  automatically create ad copy on behalf of sponsors.

AI-Media
Although the “AI” in Australian based Ai-Media actually stands for “accessibility innovation,” AI/ML is the current driving force behind the 20-year old company’s products and services. 

Much of the company’s first two decades was focused on providing live captioning services but in 2021, the company acquired long-time partner EEG to begin offering EEG’s LEXI automated captioning platform to its customers as well as to help bolster its presence in the North American market.  

It recently launched LEXI 3.0, an improved version of its flagship automatic captioning solution. Independent audits confirm LEXI 3.0 consistently delivers results with 35% fewer recognition, formatting and punctuation errors than the previous version, the company said. The latest version introduces new automated features, including speaker identification and AI-powered caption placement to avoid on-screen interference. The release boosts average quality results from 98.2% to 98.7% Number, Edition Error and Recognition Error (NER).

Combining both an automated AI-based captioning system like Lexi, along with continuing its live captioning service to customers worldwide helps set the company apart, according to John Peck, vice president of international sales.

 “We’re the only captioning supplier where we have all the background of actually producing captioning, whether it be humans and all the different quality levels and the accessibility to make sure that the end user’s needs are met,” he said. “We’re able to be that one vendor that can go from the technology platform all the way through to the service as well.” 

Interra Systems
Interra Systems’ BATON Captions is an automated solution that provides an end-to-end platform from caption generation to QC, auto corrections, review, regeneration and editing. The system is based on machine learning and automatic speech recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP), which the company says can dramatically expedite the caption creation, QC and verification processes for both live and VOD content, while ensuring a high quality.

Ashish Basu, executive vice president, worldwide sales & business, emphasizes the need for QC in an environment where AI—particularly the buzz around ChatGPT—is hyped as the panacea for captioning accuracy. This attitude can run headlong into regulatory requirements, he added. 

“While AI can generate closed captions with accuracy in the high 90% under ideal circumstances, the reality of television is that circumstances are not always ideal,” Basu recently wrote on tvtechnology.com. “Background noise and heavy accents can quickly degrade the accuracy of AI-generated closed captions. Content owners, however, have no latitude with regulators. They simply cannot blame AI for missing the regulatory mark.

“This is where the hype over ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions runs headlong into the reality of generating closed captions and subtitles,” he cautioned. “If closed captions do not meet regulatory requirements, content owners will be out of compliance and are potentially exposed to devastating business consequences.  

“Not only will the money spent to generate sub-par closed captions have been wasted and more money spent to bring them up to snuff, but also the solid business relationships those content owners are trying to establish with local partners around the world will be threatened,” Basu concluded. 

So while advances in AI are helping make closed captioning more accurate and accessible, we’re still in the early stages. As more broadcasters deploy AI, they will need to balance the need for speed and accuracy with the need to maintain compliance. 

VoiceInteraction will unveil v7.0 of its Product Suite at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 16-19. The company’s AI-driven Closed Captioning and Broadcast Compliance platforms combine proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition technology with carefully designed interfaces. 

Products showcased include Audimus.Media, VoiceInteraction’s flagship product for automatic closed captioning, which uses reliable speech recognition and the ability to handle market-specific requirements to offer high accuracy, great delivery, and caption reusability for VOD, the company said. Supporting any SDI or IP workflow, the platform also features automatic English-Spanish translation, for broadcasters reaching Hispanic audiences. With an intuitive web dashboard, Audimus.Media allows for a customized setup, control over every configured channel, access to specific features, event scheduling, and clip import into non-linear editors with fully synchronized captions.

Also on hand at the company’s booth is VoiceInteraction’s Media Monitoring System (MMS) platform, which helps TV stations reduce costs, maximize revenue, and increase viewer loyalty by seamlessly combining proprietary Speech Processing Technologies with AI algorithms and providing added features such as news segmentation from topic and keyword detection. MMS not only monitors every relevant QoS element with a multiviewer and configurable alert center, but it also incorporates analytics and metadata, allowing broadcasters to gain valuable insights into their network and competitors, the company said. 

VoiceInteraction’s new VP of Sales, Ken Dillard, will also mark his first NAB Show with the company. 

VoiceInteraction will be in Booth W2549 in the West Hall of the LVCC. 

Ai-Media, a provider of AI-powered captioning solutions, has inked a three-year partnership with global captioning provider Dynamic Captioning to market and deploy Ai-Media’s LECI automated captioning solution. 

The partnership comes after Dynamic Captioning required a more expansive LEXI reseller agreement to meet the increasing market demand for automatic captions, Ai-Media said. LEXI uses AI to deliver results “rivalling human captions at a fraction of the cost,” according to the company.

Dynamic Captioning’s LEXI customers will be able to build an end-to-end captioning solution thanks to Ai-Media’s caption delivery technology and infrastructure. LEXI captions seamlessly integrate with Ai-Media’s range of caption encoders and are delivered to screens via the iCap Cloud Network, which the company says is “the largest and most reliable caption delivery network in the world.”  

“We are seeing a significant shift in the capabilities surrounding AI which continues to positively influence consumer perceptions of automatic captioning,” said AiMedia Founder/CEO Tony Abrahams. “Partnering with Dynamic Captioning is a positive step for the LEXI growth story as we work together to meet the needs of customers and the broader market in delivering the most secure, lowest latency, highest quality automatic captions in the market today.

"We are looking forward to collaboratively working towards a successful partnership with Dynamic Captioning.”

Dynamic Captioning’s Vice President & General Manager, Brenda Clark, said “as a strategic technology partner since 2012, Dynamic Captioning highly values this new and natural expansion of our longstanding and well-seasoned working relationship with Ai-Media. Dynamic Captioning is thrilled to partner once again with Ai-Media in the emergence of state-of-the-industry captioning technologies in the ASR realm. The LEXI service is a great addition to our robust, human created, Live and Offline captioning product lines.” 

The spoken word in sports is essential to how plays unfold, how athletes observe and interact with one another, and how fans respond to the action. Accessing all this dialog has never been easier nor more entertaining, yet there’s more value to be made.

Technologies are now maturing to inject deeper, live intelligence into these conversations. The allure of having alerts and live searchable access to dramatic vocal interactions at precise moments through instant, automated insights is strong for the sports producer and director. Gaining faster access to game-changing moments on and off the field can only enrich the content available to live production teams and viewers, as well as in post-production. 

Embracing the ‘Third Rail’ of Television
These additional contact points can be enabled by embracing what we call the “’third rail’ of television content. Beyond video and audio, the raw text generated by automatically captioning every microphone feed in a venue can then produce a treasure trove of speech-generated data in real-time. 

That data can then be monitored for any special keywords spoken by people near (or wearing) specific microphones to generate logic metadata flags and alerts and to build a stored dataset of “bread crumbs” that can be hopped through live or at a later time.

Taking the steps to create text transcripts from dozens of microphone feeds requires a philosophical change. Using traditional stenographic methods to generate these captions is simply cost-prohibitive. 

However, thanks to considerable advances in Artificial Intelligence-based Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), it’s now possible to embrace a fast, reliable, and highly accurate technology platform to generate this raw text across many audio channels at the same time. By generating text records of live content, each ASR stream has its own path and can be indexed to its own microphone source (and any associated cameras).

Captioning for Better Live Content
Imagine logging to ASR a specific shotgun microphone or lavalier feed from a specific player known to be particularly chatty at times, and who might state certain words that a producer has determined would be key to that game’s coverage (perhaps related to game-play, other players, weather, or other factors). 

Now imagine you have an ISO camera trained on them, just waiting for a visual moment. Once you start captioning that feed, a back-end automated process can generate an alert telling a producer to look back in the video where keywords were spoken. The result is instant access to that desired live nugget you are seeking. 

Auto racing introduces another interesting use case by leveraging ASR to log and generate transcripts from the race car. Whenever certain drivers mention prescribed keywords, that audio (and video) can be flagged and sent to a producer to consider using for replay in the live broadcast or via social media.

In-Game Replay Applications
In-game replay applications offer another compelling approach. Imagine focusing the microphone and camera on a referee to capture key moments when they mention certain words of importance that the user pre-saved before the show. While you can have an operator log their dialog, not everything can be logged accurately. 

If you have a live ASR running on that referee’s audio feed, with the right software you can perform a text word search on their replay video to navigate to the moments where they stated those words you wanted, enabling faster access during the production. Keyword searches can be done in post-production too, as long as the user saves ASR text transcripts for each microphone feed (which would ideally also has a camera view of the subject to help pinpoint and visualize something of interest).

This treasure trove of speech data can open a whole new world of creative possibilities. No more is a production team limited to what their crew can hear or see and manually decide upon or annotate. With ASR it’s possible to have automated processes that help the user keep an “eye” out for those special moments when certain players or others say the magic words. 

ASR effectively alerts the user to that instant via logic flags, metadata, or other notifications. From there, simply conduct a search backward to the time point indicated by the transcripts to access the audio.

Broadcasters can apply this same technology to tag whenever a play-by-play or PA announcer mentions specific words or names. Did a specific player just do (or say) something interesting? When did the announcer mention that player’s name last? Now the user can search to that point and determine if there’s compelling footage.

While crucial to helping the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, captions aren’t just about FCC-mandated accessibility anymore. AI-based speech-to-text technology has evolved dramatically over the last few years. Harnessing these improvements in the world of sports opens up endless possibilities to enrich your content and ignite the fan experience to keep them coming back for more. 

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Telemundo and Hearst Television were among the award winners honored Nov. 29 by the American Council of the Blind (ACB) at the 2022 Audio Description Awards gala streamed at www.AdAwardsGala.org and by Pluto TV.

The broadcasters were recognized for their outstanding achievement in Spanish Media in the United States.

Honorees were selected from a diverse group by the ACB’s Audio Description Awards Committee.

Besides Telemundo and Hearst Television, winners included:

• Larry Goldberg, Outstanding Audio Description Visionary 
• Microsoft, Audio Description Game Changer: Innovation  
• Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Audio Description Game Changer: Inclusion 
• Described and Captioned Media Program, Audio Description Game Changer: Education  
• Paramount Global, Outstanding Achievement: Live Events  
• AMI, Outstanding Achievement: International Media- 
• Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+/Lucasfilm/Audio Description by Deluxe), Audio Description People's Choice Award. 

The gala celebrated the inclusivity and accessibility of media by recognizing the audio description achievements of those in television, streaming and the film industry in making media more accessible to better serve low-vision audiences.

More information is available on the ACB website.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Representative Anna G. Eshoo (CA-18) have introduced the Communications, Video, and Technology Accessibility Act (CVTA). 

Markey is a member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and author of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), and Eshoo is a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

The CVTA updates and amends the CVAA to keep pace with the proliferation of emerging technologies that have come online since Senator Markey’s 2010 bill was passed with bipartisan support.

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) are cosponsors.

“Since I authored the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, technologies have changed. What hasn’t changed is our obligation to make sure that everyone – including people with disabilities – has equal access to the services and technologies they need to thrive,” said Senator Markey. “That is why I am introducing the Communications, Video, and Accessibility Technology Act, to update current laws on the books so that we can meet the technological moment and ensure opportunity, independence, and equal access for all.”

“As technology has rapidly evolved over the last two decades, much of our economy and day-to-day lives have moved online,” added Rep. Eshoo. “Unfortunately, accessibility standards have stayed largely the same, leaving people with disabilities behind. In 2020, 38% of people who were blind or had low vision reported issues with at least one of the technologies needed to do their jobs, and in 2021 as many as 70% of students who are deaf or hard of hearing reported technology challenges in the educational environment. I’m proud to introduce legislation with Senator Markey to update current laws so people with disabilities have full access to modern technology that is necessary to participate equally in the 21st century.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel also weighed in with support for the legislation. “Accessibility means equal opportunity to create, participate, and communicate—and promoting accessible technology is an important part of our agency’s mission,” she said. “To do so effectively we need to keep up with emerging technologies. This legislation will help us do just that, by ensuring that people with disabilities have full access to communication products and services that are necessary to participate equally in today’s world, while laying a foundation for accessibility in future technologies.”

Since Congress enacted the CVAA in 2010, accessibility requirements for people with disabilities have not kept pace with changing technologies, the bill’s proponents said. As a result, individuals with disabilities do not have full access to many communication and video tools that are essential today. For example, the majority of video programming lacks audio descriptions for people who are blind or low vision, accuracy issues plague closed captioning on both online and televised video programming for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, video conferencing services do not have adequate functionality for people with disabilities, and deaf individuals who use sign language face significant barriers to access emergency services, the sponsors reported. 

To address these and other issues, the CVTA would:

• Improve and expand closed captioning and audio description standards for television programming and online video streaming platforms to ensure that people with disabilities have equitable access to the wide range of programming available to the general public;
• Update current requirements to ensure viewers can easily activate and select preferred settings for closed captions and audio description on their video programming devices, such as televisions, smart phones, laptops, and tablets;
• Improve access to video programming for people who are deaf and use sign language;
• Empower the FCC to ensure accessibility regulations keep pace with emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and augmented or virtual reality platforms.

A host of organizations and educational institutions also came out in favor of the act. They include: Access Living, Access Ready, American Council of the Blind, American Foundation for the Blind, Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs, Blinded Veterans Association, CommunicationFIRST, Carroll Center for the Blind, Communication Service for the Deaf, Hearing Loss Association of America, National Association of the Deaf, National Federation of the Blind, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc., Perkins School For The Blind, and United Spinal Association.

The full test of the bill is available here. 

NEW YORK—The local news market is on the receiving end of a personalized captioning solution after the introduction of a new live TV captioning ASR solution.

After the acquisition of the captioning company VITAC in 2021, the Verbit Company announced the release of an as-yet-unnamed automatic captioning system with hybrid capabilities that is based on ASR technology. The solution will be unveiled at the upcoming NAB Show New York event, running from Oct. 19-20 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.

The new product is a customized, adaptable engine developed with input from captioning, speech and machine-learning experts and includes features such as professional data prep by specialists who research and review content added to the ASR engine before each session starts. Clients are given the option to request a so-called human co-pilot for control of a live ASR session in real time, which provides support in corrections, custom caption placement and domain changes. 

Verbit, which is now comprised of VITAC as well as Automatic Sync Technologies, Take 1, Take Note and US Captioning, employs what it says is the largest professional captioning workforce in the world.

“Verbit is proud to expand its superior AI transcription technologies into the media space through the launch of VITAC’s newest product offering — an adapted and hybrid automatic captioning solution designed for the North American broadcast market,” said Raffi Margaliot, Verbit chief product and technology officer. 

NOVI, Mich.—ENCO‘s demonstrations at the upcoming IBC2022 exhibition will be highlighted by the European trade show debut of enCaption5, the fifth generation of its AI-enhanced enCaption automated captioning and transcription solution. Exhibiting in stand 8.C75, the company will showcase powerful enhancements including a new, cloud-native architecture; a redesigned user interface; integrated caption editing; expanded multi-language translation capabilities; and a new open API for seamless integration. IBC Show takes place at the RAI Amsterdam, Sept. 9-13.

The award-winning enCaption platform makes it fast, easy, and cost-effective for broadcasters, content producers, and AV professionals to create transcripts and add closed or open captions to both live and pre-recorded content. enCaption combines machine learning with advanced speech-to-text conversion and grammatical structure analysis to deliver exceptional accuracy with extremely low latency.

enCaption5 has been redeveloped from the ground up as a cloud-native solution to take full advantage of public cloud infrastructure, enabling exceptional scalability and flexibility while eliminating the need for on-premises capital equipment when captioning or transcribing file-based content. enCaption5 can also be deployed on-premises or in hybrid on-prem/cloud workflows for customers who need SDI signal connectivity for live captioning or who prefer an on-premises solution.

“Captioning, subtitling, and transcription are increasingly important for broadcasters even beyond regulatory requirements,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “In addition to making content more inclusively accessible for hard-of-hearing audiences, these functions also make it accessible to non-native-language speakers and the significant percentage of viewers who watch video on their mobile devices with the sound muted. enCaption5 makes deploying and using automated captioning easier and more cost-effective than ever before, and we’re looking forward to showcasing it to IBC attendees.”

During Netflix’s Q4 2021 earnings call, COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters revealed the company “subtitled 7 million run-time minutes in '21 and dubbed 5 million run-time minutes” of content to reach their 222 million subscribers worldwide. That’s 116,666 hours of subtitles and 83,333 hours of dubs they produced before releasing titles anywhere across their 192-territory footprint. That’s a massive undertaking.

Those familiar with the process know “subs and dubs” are done by separate teams of people simultaneously. These teams include translators, editors, proofreaders, managers, producers, quality control, and others responsible for ensuring stories are translated accurately into various languages and are appropriate in as many diverse cultures worldwide as possible.

Kudos to Netflix for investing in the content that requires localization and taking on the challenge of preparing it for global markets. Despite the popularity of “Squid Game” last year, inaccurate translations of stories can adversely impact the viewer’s experience. With that said, linguistic skills are only part of the equation. Familiarity with local culture is crucial when conveying scene or dialogue nuance in the final product. Still, not everyone has that knowledge, and issues are not always caught before a title is released.

Netflix’s remake of “Perfect Strangers” is an excellent example of how being aware of cultural or contextual issues can affect audience acceptance of a title. Released in the Middle East on January 20, the film immediately drew fire from many in the region. Because it included a gay character, some claimed critics felt the film promoted homosexuality and “moral degradation.” One Egyptian critic on Twitter said Netflix “has an agenda to spread ‘deviant ideas’ to ‘normalize false ideas.’” 

The conflict ultimately led lawyers in Egypt to call for an outright ban of the film or face a lawsuit against the country’s Culture Ministry. In its story on the controversy, the Hollywood Reporter said, “few would have anticipated the immediate wave of controversy it would provoke.”

Given the history of cultural sensitivities and censorship in the Middle East to LGBTQIA+ and promiscuous sexual references, this controversy could have been anticipated. Awareness of these concerns in this and other markets is not as widespread as it needs to be despite dozens of examples. Improvements are necessary to incorporate what we call “culturalization” into the localization process.

Netflix now has to deal with the negative press and reputational hit as a company “that spreads poisons.” What does this mean for future titles Netflix wants to release in the region, and how willing will local regulators be to allow them to exhibit? From both a legal and marketing context, it’s better to know when problems may arise before they happen.

Unfamiliarity with local culture and customs may have been what Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann alluded to during their earnings call, “Entertainment is still fundamentally pretty local around the world. So, it's global and local, and we need to figure that out.” The good news is that tools and techniques are available to make localization more accurate, culturally respectful, and appropriate. It is easier to avoid being hit by the proverbial bus when you know the route.

With its publication in the Federal Register, the comment deadlines for the Federal Communications Commission's request for input on making multichannel video programming distributors' (MVPDs) closed captioning settings more accessible have been set.

Initial comments are due February 17 and replies March 4.

The FCC is revisiting a 2015 proposal to require manufacturers and MVPDs to make closed captioning display settings on TV sets “readily accessible“ to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and whether to expand that potential mandate beyond TV sets to the wealth of other video display technologies in an IP, over-the-top world.

Among the issues on which the FCC’s Media Bureau wants comment on is whether both device manufacturers and MVPDs should be responsible for making sure consumers can find and use the closed captioning display setting controls.

The FCC proposed the display rules in 2015 under Democratic then-chairman Tom Wheeler. The initial comment period closed, though, and the agency took no action on the item in the ensuing six years. Under new chair Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC‘s Media Bureau is reopening the issue to “refresh the record,” signaling action could now be taken.

Also: FCC Forum Highlights Closed Captioning Issues

The FCC adopted a mandate in 1990 that TV receivers have the circuitry to display closed captions, and in 2000 adopted display and performance standards to allow users to customize captions by changing font, size, color and more.

In 2010, Congress passed the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), which expanded the closed captioning display and function requirements to any “apparatus designed to receive or play back video programming transmitted simultaneously with sound,” which now covers a host of technologies for accessing traditional and online video. But while the rules require equipment functionality, they do not mandate how those must be provided to the user.

The FCC said there are ongoing complaints about the difficulty of accessing those settings via a remote or on-screen menu.

Enter the 2015 proposed rules to mandate ready access, on which no action was taken but which drew a lot of comment from industry players who questioned the FCC's authority to impose new device mandates.

The FCC wants new input on that authority issue, as well as, given the complaints it has received, “to what extent are manufacturers and MVPDs currently ‘making caption display settings accessible via mechanisms reasonably comparable to a button, key or icon,‘ such as ‘a button on the remote or access through the first level of a menu.‘” 

WASHINGTON D.C.—The FCC is asking for public comment on updating its closed captioning rules for television as well as for a broad range of video devices. Perhaps acknowledging technological advances since it last solicited public input on the subject in 2015, the commission says part of the reason it is doing so is in response to consumer complaints it has received since then. 

In 2015, the FCC proposed rules that would require manufacturers of applicable video devices  and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to make closed captioning display settings readily accessible to individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing and asked commenters to address the commission’s authority to adopt such rules under the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 (TDCA). 

The FCC’s actions six years ago were designed to update the ”Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010" (CVAA) that broadened the definition and scope of what programming and devices were subject to closed captioning rules. No action was taken in 2015 so the FCC is asking for public comment to update its implementation of CVAA.

“Since the Commission last invited comment on these issues, consumers and other stakeholders have raised ongoing concerns about difficulties consumers face when attempting to access closed captioning display settings across a host of technologies and services,” the commission said. “For instance, the Commission has received consumer complaints regarding user interfaces and the difficulty of adjusting closed captioning settings. Furthermore, comments received earlier this year in response to a related public notice concerning the Commission’s implementation of the CVAA suggest that these issues persist.  

“Most recently, at a forum co-hosted by the Media Bureau and the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, panelists detailed the discoverability and ease of use challenges posed by closed captioning display settings across an increasingly fragmented video programming hardware and software environment,” the commission added.

The FCC is also seeking comments on whether it has the authority to require that closed captioning display settings be readily accessible, the means by which the commission would implement a requirement that consumers be able to readily access user display settings for closed captioning, and the extent to which it can impose such rules on all devices defined under the CVAA.

More information is available here.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission will be holding the `Video Programming Accessibility Forum – Online Closed Captioning' on December 2, to explore ways to improve accessibility of OTT content. 

The virtual forum will run from 1:00 pm to 3:45 pm ET on December 2. The FCC’s Media Bureau and Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will co-host the Forum.  FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel will welcome Forum participants and Senator Ed Markey will deliver keynote remarks.

The forum will also feature two panels with speakers from television, cable, and online video programming distributors, academia and consumer advocacy organizations.  

The FCC noted that consumers currently access video programming from providers that range from traditional entities, such as broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), to a growing number of online streaming service providers, including those that operate social media platforms.  

`The Video Programming Accessibility Forum – Online Closed Captioning' will explore the state of closed captioning availability for online video programming and discuss ways to enhance accessibility, including the Commission’s authority to adopt new rules, the FCC said. 

The Forum also will explore current and prospective best practices and other existing or possible voluntary efforts that could enhance the availability of closed captioning online.

The public event will be streamed live on fcc.gov/live and the FCC’s YouTube channel. Additional information is available here. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau has announced that it has settled an investigation with Pluto Inc. and its parent company, ViacomCBS Inc., regarding violations of the Commission’s accessibility rules.

As part of the settlement, Pluto will pay a $3.5 million civil penalty for the violations and has agreed to enter into a compliance plan to ensure that the non-exempt video programming Pluto streams over the internet includes closed captioning in compliance with Commission rules.

The FCC reported that today’s action reflects the first consent decree and first enforcement action related to Internet Protocol (IP) closed captioning rules since their adoption in 2012.

The IP-closed captioning rules apply broadly to the distributors, providers, and owners of IP-delivered video programming, the FCC said. 

The rules require that all nonexempt full-length video programming delivered using Internet Protocol must be provided with closed captions if the programming was previously shown on television in the United States with captions or is live programming being shown on television in the United States with captions.

The FCC reported that the Enforcement Bureau’s investigation confirmed that Pluto failed to comply with the IP closed captioning rules when distributing video programming on numerous platforms used to disseminate Pluto TV.  

Additionally, the company failed to implement the closed captioning functionality requirements and make contact information available to users in order to submit written closed captioning complaints.  

As a result of Pluto’s actions, individuals with hearing disabilities were unable to access closed captioning when viewing Pluto TV over some platforms, the FCC said. 

The consent decree is available here.   

NOVI, Mich.—The Enco enCaption system has found a place in the Pennsylvania Senate, as the Senate Video Facility has chosen the product to provide automated closed-captioning services for TV and some in-person operations for hard-of-hearing individuals.

The Senate had previously attempted to provide closed-captioning services by pulling data from the court reporter’s transcription system, however the results proved unreliable. Meanwhile, the option of human transcribers presented scheduling issues, the Senate found.

Dave Costanza, the certified broadcast networking technologist who heads up the Senate’s broadcasting operations, eventually tested the enCaption system and opted to make it their permanent solution.

The Senate Video Facility now has four enCaption systems, placed in the Chamber and three hearing rooms. Each space has remotely controlled cameras feeding video switchers, with the program audio feed routed to the enCaption system. The resulting captions are fed to an external encoder for incorporation into the final video signal, which are then sent to the Pennsylvania Cable Network for distribution throughout the state.

In addition to closed-captioning for TV broadcast, the enCaption system is occasionally used for in-room captioning needs, providing openly displayed captions in the event that a participant is hard-of-hearing.

For more information, visit www.enco.com.  

NOVI, Mich.—To ensure the continued delivery of closed captioning services for its hard-of-hearing viewers, Civic Center Television, part of the City Manager’s Office of San Jose, Calif., began using Enco’s AI-enabled enCaption4 automated closed captioning system.

In previous years, the city had contracted service providers that used human captioners to transcribe content. However, because of budget shortfalls related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AI-powered captioning service from Enco helped reduce operational costs.

“As a PEG channel, we have a capital fund that’s derived from the franchise and PEG fees the cable provider pays back to municipality,” said Craig Jutson, broadcast engineer and operations manager for the City Manager’s Office. “We can’t use that for operational expenses such as paying human captioners, so I proposed that we save the money we were spending on those contracts and purchase an automated system.”

The City of San Jose purchased a pair of enCaption4 units to support its two live productions simultaneously and provide backup redundancy. The platform stood out based on its form factor, processing quality and interface, according to Jutson. In addition, Enco’s partnership with Tightrope Media Systems make the enCaption4 available to PEG stations as a special package.

Jutson has added the names of council members, neighborhoods and other unique local elements into enCaption4’s dictionary to assist captioning. He also says the systems have learned since their installation on how to accurately generate other hard-to-spell pronunciations.

The enCaption4 units, in addition to covering live events like council meetings, add captions to offline content from other city departments. The platform generates standalone, “sidecar” caption files from on-demand video clips that are copied into a watch folder. Using Tightrope’s support for MCC and SCC caption files, the results are brought into the city’s Cablecast video server and associate them with corresponding media for playout.

For more information, visit www.enco.com.  

The art and science of automated real-time captioning for television has evolved considerably in the last several years, with continually increasing accuracy thanks in-part to Artificial Intelligence-based learning (where the speech recognition “learns” via human feedback), faster processing and more innovative approaches to embracing the broader captioning workflow. 

Even before adding additional guidance from the creation of unique word lists, the finest automated captioning systems are delivering accuracy percentages in the mid- to high-90s today. Additional accuracy comes from ingesting unique words, people’s names, regional words and spellings that help to dial-in the AI’s accuracy (“does she spell her name as Kris or Chris?”).

IMMEDIATE NEEDS

Totally on-premises captioning systems are generally the “Best in Class” option, and you can't find a much faster way to caption. That’s because where most human captioners are remotely located, often working out of their homes and only listening to an audio feed via phone, an on-premises solution seriously shortens the complexity of patching-in and scheduling a remote human captioner—and if breaking news means you have to caption immediately, just flip the switch and you're on. 

The speed of automatic speech recognition (ASR) has also improved a lot, and is faster than humans captioners today. The smarter AI-based systems, (such as ENCO’s enCaption product), know the words almost immediately, but pause a second or two to gain further accuracy via on-the-fly statistical analysis, predicting what words generally work together and which don't. That, coupled with being on-premise, makes for quick captioning (if your workflow requires cloud processing, there are many solutions for that as well). 

Captioning workflows are now far more than just embedding CEA-608/708 data into your transmission signal, too.

THE ‘THIRD RAIL’

Captioning is the “third rail” of your transmission media—you have video, audio and you have captions. While traditional captions have just included the dialog, today we see more value-added captions, such as the name of a song that’s playing or sound effects in the program. This means as a broadcaster, you have more ways to address your viewers than just video and sound.

Though there’s an estimated 48 million Americans who report being hard of hearing or deaf, captions serve an even larger audience than that. Ever been in a restaurant with lots of TV’s on a weekend—how many different sports games are on at the same time? And yet, the PA system is likely playing only one play-by-play. Thanks to captions, you can still gain insights into any of the other games being shown by reading their captions. Then there’s the opposite scenario, where your viewers are watching from a quiet location where they don't want to disturb anyone near them—captions make it possible for them to enjoy your content there too (you do caption everything, right?).

When you caption everything, interesting possibilities start to emerge.

With more television broadcasters using automated video logging and compliance software, they may already have a powerful tool there to make captions even more useful. Many of these types of products allow for the logging of all the caption data—aligned with the video—such that you can jump to an index point just by just clicking on the caption.

It then quickly becomes an easy task to search across all the feeds you’re recording, making it instantly possible to find the conversation, brand or person’s name you're looking for, with “point and click” precision. Moreover, this capability doesn't just have to be available to your producers, as you can easily bring such access online to your website and your viewers.

CAPTION EVERYTHING

Nowadays you can search YouTube videos with the results limited to only videos that are captioned—if you have any video that’s not captioned, it won't even show up in the results. Automated captioning means the more you caption (both live and offline files), the more economical ASR products become. Which means—caption everything.

Since it costs less using smart AI automation, why not use it to caption more of your audio feeds? How about captioning the audio associated with ISO camera feeds you may have at sporting or other special events? You don't always have enough resources to monitor all the audio or video coming in from these ISO feeds, but by using an ASR to caption automatically, you can set up software to alert you when certain keywords are said on these audio feeds—helping improve your real-time access to more content faster and automatically (whether producing a live broadcast or in post production).

PLUS: The Importance of Automating Live Captioning in Broadcasting

Be sure to consider what you're captioning online, as well. While the FCC regulates only some captioning for online streaming and OTT/VOD applications, the Americans with Disabilities Act may impact other aspects, and there are many organizations committed to growing accessibility standards across all media (some who are not afraid to bring lawsuits in the process).

Therefore, if you’ve got an on-premises captioning system that’s not being used for real-time all the time, why not use it in file-based mode and caption the thousands of hours of legacy video you already have? Just like with live video, this can make your content more accessible to more people (and search engines), is good for business and it gives your content that “third rail.”

There’s a lot of innovation taking place in the captioning industry, bringing more value to more people, and in the process, giving you more ways to keep in touch with your audience.

Bill Bennett is media solutions account manager for ENCO Systems.

WASHINGTON—While the FCC is seeking comments on whether new rules should be implemented to measure the quality of live closed captioning, the National Association of Broadcasters took the opportunity to shoot down the notion entirely.

In its reply comments to the commission in regard to the petition (RM-11848), NAB said that “such rulemaking is unnecessary because the existing caption quality standards and best practices, coupled with an extensive compliance program, have yielded high-quality captions. The record does not justify the requested change in approach to ensuring caption quality.”

The NAB details how when the 2014 Caption Quality Order was established the FCC rejected caption quality metrics that would have required video programming distributors to monitor and compare live closed captioning against a quantifiable standard, citing it as an “undue burden.” Instead, the caption quality standards and best practices were created.

“The existing caption quality standards, best practices and compliance program have successfully ensured high-quality captions,” the NAB writes. “NAB finds no justification in the record to change course by imposing an uncertain, inflexible metrics-based scheme. At a minimum, the requested proceeding is far from ripe, given the nascent nature of the Captioning DRRP’s project.”

The Radio Television Digital News Association also filed comments opposing the petition.

“RTDNA agrees with NAB that a change in course at this time is premature and would prove to be counterproductive,” the comments read. “RTDNA respectfully submits that (1) closed captioning has markedly improved under the current best practices framework; (2) a metrics-based system for assessing caption quality would be unduly burdensome to RTDNA’s members and undermine the integrity of their news operations; and (3) premature rules governing the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology would stymie ongoing innovation in closed captioning technology.”

“News organizations and local stations continue to make great strides toward increasing the accessibility of local news and public affairs programming to the deaf and hard of hearing community,” RTDNA continues. “To be sure, there is still work to be done. … The commission’s approach is working, and there is no evidence to suggest that a metrics-based enforcement scheme would do anything but impede progress. Moreover, the commission should leave the industry free to evaluate new captioning techniques within the context of existing best practices.”

More comments regarding this petition are available on the FCC website.

WASHINGTON—The National Association of Broadcasters and NCTA-The Internet & Television Association have asked the FCC to extend the comment and reply deadlines on the FCC’s proposed rules for live closed captioning by one month.

Comments are currently due Sept. 13 and replies are due Sept. 30; the organizations are asking the deadlines be moved to Oct. 15 and Oct. 30, respectively, citing an upcoming conference between the associations and the deaf and hard of hearing community, Oct. 3.

“We request an extension to provide both industry and advocacy organizations time to prepare comments that reflect closed captioning quality discussions that will take place during an upcoming conference among NAB, NCTA and representatives of deaf and hard of hearing advocacy organizations on Oct. 2, 2019,” they said.

[Read more: FCC Debates Evolution of Live Captioning for News]

“We plan to discuss at the upcoming meeting the full range of current policy issues and technical developments regarding closed captioning, including many of the issues raised in the Petition,” they continued. “We intend to address the Commission’s best practices approach to ensuring captioning quality, consumers’ views of live captioning and the progress of the Disability and Rehabilitation Research Project study of captioning quality metrics. We also plan to discuss emerging closed captioning technologies such as automated speech recognition, which is critical to the instant Petition.” 

LAS VEGAS–At the 2019 NAB Show, VITAC, a Colorado-based provider of captioning services, launched VPC Control Tower, what the company describes as a “first-of-its-kind” cloud-based application that allows easy, always-on connections between captioners, events, and clients, and serves as a central hub that establishes multilevel monitoring and management of client programming.

The latest part of the company’s VITAC Power Connect product line, VPC Control Tower serves as a “traffic director” for captions, ensuring that captioners using VPC Client, a new, specially developed VITAC software are routed to the proper audio and video sources as well as the correct endpoints. VPC Control Tower enables 24/7 monitoring not only of captions and caption paths, but also of the entire captioning workflow process, including captioner readiness, caption transmission, and transcript delivery, according to the company.

Launched at the 2017 NAB Show, VITAC Power Connect is part of the company’s large-scale initiative to connect, control, monitor, and report on continuous network connections between realtime captioners and live broadcasting encoders, minimizing threats such as captioning loss due to ISP outages and modem disconnects.

The first delivery, the “Connect” phase, announced at the 2018 NAB Show, was the VPC Hardener, which provided a multi-line path from the captioner to the encoder for use in troubled areas. Also in 2018, VITAC introduced the concept of VPC Control Tower, which links together captioners, encoders, and audio and video lines, and enables staff to control and monitor captions and connections at a never-before-seen level of detail, according to the company.

At the 2019 NAB Show, VITAC also introduced another feature of VITAC Power Connect, a reporting function designed to provide dashboards and reporting for clients and VITAC control teams.

KANSAS CITY, MO.—KCCG-TV2 is the government access channel for Kansas City, Mo., airing council meetings, special events and original programming designed to keep residents connected and informed. The 24/7 TV channel is a function of the City Communications Office and on Spectrum, Google Fiber and AT&T U-Verse, and online through Granicus and our YouTube channel.

We have closed captioned our programming for more than 15 years, for regulatory requirements and as a best practice. Until recently, we had been using closed captioners in real time. For government meetings, the captioners would call in via phone line or connect over IP to our Link Electronics 3000 closed caption encoders. They would do the captioning live, and we would record the video with its encoded captions.

We scheduled weekly captioning sessions for our short-form programming, but if we received a new program request from a department or elected official that needed to go on-air more immediately, we had to coordinate with a captioner at the last minute. We also needed to take the time to play back the new show in real time for the captioning to be performed, and if there were any issues along the way, we had to start over—sometimes doing two or three passes.

In all of these cases, we also needed to trim the beginning and end of the captioned recordings, as they were not precisely timed. These were extra steps we wanted to eliminate.

IN-HOUSE DEMO

With so many consumer devices offering various forms of natural voice transcription, I started researching professional solutions for automated closed captioning. Some vendors allowed us to send short video samples for them to run through their system as a test, but the results were usually not very good, and a 20-second video clip wasn’t sufficient to convince us whether or not the systems would meet our needs. In contrast, ENCO allowed us to demo enCaption in-house, which gave us the confidence it would work the way we hoped and eliminate unnecessary steps.

I’m also an engineer, not an accountant, but I know we’re saving a pretty significant amount of money.

Installation of the enCaption system was straightforward—SDI in, SDI out, a network cable, monitor, keyboard and mouse, and we were up and running. The enCaption system takes our master output right before it hits our transmission gear, creating the captions and passing them over IP to our Link 3000 encoder, which then connects to our transmission chain. Our complete live channel is thus captioned 24/7, which we couldn’t afford to do with live stenographers.

The enCaption system has taken many steps out of our day-to-day operations, particularly when putting new programming into rotation. I no longer need to worry about issues like trimming; once our editors have finished a show, I can drop it into our playback system, and call it a day. The enCaption system handles the captioning on the way out.

Ultimately, that efficiency translates into financial savings. We try to use our citizens’ money responsibly, and by saving us time, manpower and operational costs, enCaption allows us to be more productive on a smaller budget.

Joel Cogan is the engineer for KCCGTV2 and has worked at the station for over 18 years. He can be reached atJoel.Cogan@kcmo.org.

For more information, visitenco.comor call 248-827-4440.

NEVADA CITY, CALIF.--Telestream has updated its CaptionMaker closed captioning and subtitling software with support for over 100 languages, as well as the ability to auto-transcribe via the Telestream Timed Text Speech cloud service, dramatically saving transcription time.

Video media in languages such as Russian, Tagalog, Japanese, German, and other Asian, African, and European languages can automatically be transcribed by accessing the Timed Text Speech service directly from within CaptionMaker. The results can then be edited, formatted, and exported as industry standard caption and subtitle files.

“The new extensive language support and auto-transcription available through CaptionMaker 8 offers a unique captioning and subtitling workflow for international language video post-production,” said Giovanni Galvez, Product Manager for captioning and subtitling at Telestream. “Users can access Telestream Cloud’s Timed Text Speech auto-transcription capabilities from within CaptionMaker whenever required with an affordable Cloud subscription.”

For high-volume, enterprise workflows, users can batch submit media using the Vantage Cloud Speech connector. The Vantage Cloud Speech Action can return a plain text document or a subtitle SRT file. The result can be converted to an SCC or various other subtitle formats using Vantage Timed Text Flip. Subtitle files can be further edited in CaptionMaker or used by a transcoder such as IPTV Flip.

CaptionMaker now includes an Audio Waveform Timeline that displays a graphical representation of all spoken dialogue. This feature helps editors when making critical adjustments to any professional subtitle or caption project.

For a complete list of languages supported in CaptionMaker version 8 go to: www.telestream.net/captioning/timed-text-speech.htm

At the NAB Show New York 2018, Global Media Solutions and Services Provider Digital Nirvana will present its powerful content-based metadata creation app Metadator for AVID media platform users, cloud-based closed caption generation and caption retrieval and synchronization service, and the latest version of its flagship Media Monitoring Platform. With over two decades of industry experience, DN's expertise in the development and application of innovative solutions is unparalleled. Digital Nirvana's revolutionary workflow ensures the best in automation and customization, providing sustainable solutions to its customers.

Digital Nirvana will showcase its offerings at booth #N546 during NAB New York from October 17-18 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center.

NAB New York continues to be a significant part of our year-long efforts to pitch our branding and outreach to prospective clients,” said Hiren Hindocha, CEO, Digital Nirvana. “New York area broadcasters and content creators who were not able to attend NAB in Las Vegas or the IBC in Amsterdam have the opportunity to attend a quality trade show with many of the same players in their own backyard. We’re eager to demonstrate our new software and services at NAB New York and connect with our current and prospective customers during this high-profile, regional show.”

Metadator

Metadator will make its New York debut this year after its introduction at the NAB Show in Las Vegas during April last year. Metadator is an application that simplifies content-based metadata creation for AVID users. The application has the ability to export media from AVID, create metadata automatically over the cloud along with locators, automatically ingest and attach itself to the video asset present in AVID Interplay. It helps creating a searchable database within the AVID MAM infrastructure that has multiple benefits in an increasing metadata-centric media world. With the introduction of Metadator, Digital Nirvana has been able to serve the rapidly growing AVID user community across the globe.

Closed Caption Generation

At NAB New York, Digital Nirvana will also showcase its automated, cloud-based Closed Caption Generation service for all pre-recorded and online video content. The service is backed by a powerful workflow with proven speech-to-text at its core and levels of checks based on customer quality requirements. Considering the delivery requirements to multiple platforms, customers can now request for any or all standard formats for broadcast and IP delivery for video content.

Closed Caption Retrieval and Synchronization

Digital Nirvana’s Caption Lookup service is an effective way to quickly look up for captions from broadcast content, synchronize it, and reuse for online publishing. Captions associated with any broadcast content can easily be retrieved by submitting media clips over Rest API. Digital Nirvana's state-of-the-art Retrieval technology makes content retrieval easy by maintaining a fingerprint database for broadcast content along with associated closed captions for selected channels.

MonitorIQ Media Management Platform

Also making its appearance at NAB New York is Digital Nirvana’s MonitorIQ Media Management Platform, Version 5.2, a broadcast monitoring and logging system that offers a host of new user-friendly features, including support for H.264 recording, strengthened IPTV protocol support for and updated calendar controls. MonitorIQ delivers a full range of multi-channel signal monitoring, logging, loudness monitoring, compliance, competitive analysis, advertisement verification, content repurposing and archiving functions - enabling broadcasters to capture live content from multiple sources live, and check the video for quality and compliance.

About NAB New York:

An annual trade show produced by the National Association of Broadcasters, NAB Show will be held during October 17 - 18, 2018 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York. With more than 14,000 registrants and 300+ exhibitors, NAB Show New York showcases the best in next-generation technology for media, entertainment and technology professionals from diverse industries. NAB is the largest show for media, entertainment and technology with conferences and workshops focused on television, film, satellite, online video, live events, podcasting, advertising, corporate A/V, production and post production.

About Digital Nirvana:

Founded in 1996, Digital Nirvana, with its repertoire of innovative solutions, specializes in empowering customers worldwide with knowledge management technologies. Digital Nirvana's comprehensive service portfolio includes media monitoring and analysis, media solutions and services, investment research services, and learning management services. Customers rely on Digital Nirvana to improve operational efficiencies, ensure compliance, reduce costs, and protect revenue streams. DN’s compliance driven solutions offers its customers unmatched quality, proven versatility, and best-in-class performance that help organizations to streamline operations and gain competitive advantage. Digital Nirvana is headquartered in Fremont, California with global delivery locations in Hyderabad and Coimbatore, India. 

Automation has been infused into innumerable elements of our daily lives. From production and assembly lines to broadcast facilities around the world, the transition to automated processes and workflows now have deep roots, and have forever changed the way we work, shop and entertain.

A common concern across all appliances of automation is the reduction, or outright elimination, of the human element. While the transition from manual to automated operations will undoubtedly remove human error in many cases, there are certainly more sensitive tasks where the argument for maintaining a manual workflow remains strong.

In the broadcast space, the transition to automated closed-captioning workflows is one topic that breeds intense discussion both for and against. However, the technology has advanced enough to instill confidence with broadcasters in many of today’s top DMAs, clearly representing the future of this important application.

EVOLUTION OF SPEECH-TO-TEXT

Speech recognition dates back to the 1950s, with modest first steps focused on digits and the most basic English words. With consumer services such as Siri and Alexa continuing to improve with each product generation, it’s clear that speed and accuracy in speech-to-text recognition has come a long way. So goes the same with automated captioning technology, which benefits today from the strengths of modern artificial intelligence.

[For an opposing view, read: Is It Live, Or Is It Automated Speech Recognition?]

While different mandates on closed-captioning in broadcast television exist around the world, the unifying purpose ensures that deaf and hearing-impaired viewers can fully understand and enjoy the shows they watch. Beyond the hearing impaired, statistics show that one in six viewers worldwide prefer to receive closed captions with their content.

Production and transmission of live, manual closed captioning has long been challenged by high costs, availability, varied latency, and inconsistent accuracy rates. And it’s true that the transition to more automated, software-defined captioning workflows introduced a new series of challenges.

For example, while automatic speech recognition removes the cost and staffing concerns of manual captioning, the performance of early-generation servers and processors demonstrated accuracy and latency problems. These issues were especially magnified for broadcasters that must now deliver accurate closed captioning across a multichannel, multilingual, multistandard and multiplatform media landscape.

These concerns are rapidly diminishing. The accuracy of speech-to-text conversion across multiple languages continues to improve with the emergence of powerful, deep neural network advances. In fact, accuracy across today’s strongest platforms has been raised to 90 percent or higher. The statistical algorithms associated with these advances, coupled with larger multilingual databases to mine, more effectively interpret—and accurately spell out—the speech coming through the air feed or mix-minus microphone.

Meanwhile, the faster and more powerful processing of computing engines within automated captioning technology has significantly reduced the latency to near real-time. This achievement is particularly impressive given that automated captions took between 30–60 seconds on many systems as recently as one or two generations ago.

Additionally, as closed-captioning software matures, emerging applications to eliminate crosstalk, improve speaker identification and ignore interruptions are improving the overall quality and experience for hearing impaired viewers.

MARCHING FORWARD

Many of the above improvements are related to recent breakthroughs in machine learning technology, which have enabled a deep neural network approach to voice recognition. Machine learning not only strengthens accuracy, it also provides value through detection of different languages and the different ways that people speak.

That intelligence as it relates to different dialects will provide an overall boost to accuracy in closed captioning. Consider a live news operation, where on-premise, automated captioning software now directly integrates with newsroom computer systems without the need for a network connection. This will now help broadcasters strengthen availability—no concerns about a network outage taking the system down—and take advantage of news scripts and rundowns to learn and validate the spelling of local names and terminology. Both of these points were once major and justified arguments against automated captioning.

Automated captioning also enables the applications to be achieved efficiently on a larger scale—costs are lowered due to the transition from human stenographers to computer automation. And as there is a need to caption a growing amount of content, there is an economy of scale that drives the cost down even further as broadcasters automate these processes.

As systems grow more reliable and broadcasters grow more comfortable with the technology, they will also find new efficiencies and opportunities along the way. For one, broadcasters that need to cut into a regularly scheduled program with breaking news or weather alerts will no longer be forced to find qualified (and expensive) live captioners on short notice.

Improvements in captioning technology have also been timely around emerging needs, including networks tasked with captioning large libraries of prerecorded content. As more systems move to software-defined platforms, the captioning workflow for prerecorded and/or long-form content has been greatly simplified. Post-production staff can essentially drag-and-drop video files into a file-based workflow that extracts the audio track for text conversion. These files can then be delivered in various lengths and formats for a TV broadcast, the web, mobile and other platforms.

And with multiplatform reach, broadcasters also have opportunities to caption live and on-demand streams, ensuring that hearing-impaired and multilingual audiences watching online are properly served as well. The future of this technology is very exciting, especially with the knowledge that we’re really just beginning to reap the fruits of this technology.

Ken Frommert is president of ENCO.

SOUTHFIELD, MI—ENCO has announced that its enCaption4 automated captioning solution now supports the NDI protocol for to provide turnkey closed or open captions on live video.

enCaption4 is an on-premise or cloud-based solution featuring a real-time speech to text engine for generating accurate live captioning that live TV and online video require. Now, broadcasters, content producers and commercial AV facilities with an NDI infrastructure can add an automated captioning solution into their workflows. Once connected, enCaption4 can automatically generate captions through its NDI input stream, and output an NDI signal with captions keyed directly on top of the video stream. This capability eliminates the need for specialized encoding hardware.

[Read: Closed-Captioning Technology Evolves]

At the NAB Show, ENCO will demonstrate enCaption4 with this new NDI capability alongside the software-defined solution’s breakthrough accuracy, accelerated speed, extremely low latency, and expanded foreign language support.

“With the growing popularity of NDI, we added NDI support based on customer demand,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “With NDI support, we’re making it easier for TV networks, local stations and non-traditional broadcasters such as corporations, schools and universities, houses of worship, and webcasters to use our automated captioning solutions within their real-time NDI productions.” 

Captioning for television has come a long way since it was first introduced in 1972 when the most popular cooking show of the time, “The French Chef” with Julia Child, was captioned.

The idea of captioning was quickly embraced by deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and grew in popularity with general audiences as well since it helped viewers clearly interpret their favorite programs. Closed captioning steadily evolved from conventional methods to voice writing, to what is currently a far more automated process. The application of closed captioning has also evolved as it now improves the discoverability of video content and cognitive modeling (simulating human problem solving in a computerized model) for automated analysis of broadcast content.

Creators of news and sports content face new challenges with the latest FCC regulations, which designate video clips of live and near-live TV programming published online have up to 12-hour and 8-hour delays in posting closed captioning after the programming has appeared on TV, respectively. Existing FCC closed-captioning quality rules also require non-live programming captions to be accurate, complete and in-sync with the dialogues. While content producers may view it as a challenge to stream video content that’s in compliance with this law, there are multiple captioning services that can be used to ensure regulatory compliance while simultaneously improving user experience.

[Online Live And Near-Live Captioning Deadline Is July 1]

One way to quickly comply with the new FCC rules is by repurposing broadcast captions using a fully automated cloud-based caption synchronization service. These services scan for unsynchronized broadcast captions that are sent to an application for automatic synchronization and generate multiple formats suitable for publishing the content online. This technology coordinates all pre-recorded and online video content through an automated process in the cloud providing a suite of options for clipping, data transfer and caption formats as well as integration directly to the customer’s video platform. Since cloud-based technology does not lock a provider into a specific vendor, users can integrate this technology into their existing workflow via API’s.

Another challenge broadcasters face while publishing media online is the non-availability of captions. For instance, broadcasters may lose track of original broadcast captions and may need to regenerate captions for the content to be published online. A caption lookup service can help quickly identify captions associated with specific broadcast content. Typically, a caption lookup service uses state-of-the-art fingerprint technology to precisely identify air-time of a piece of media and then looks up for associated captions based on identified air-time.

Using a caption lookup service, the original captions from the broadcast program are retrieved, synchronized and used for online clips. Caption lookup along with synchronization process offers great advantages to production houses or streaming video providers to sync captions after editing content for air in multiple countries. Since the original captions are retrieved using the lookup process, there’s no need to re-do the entirety of their subtitles and captions. The synchronization and format conversion necessary to meet all requirements are provided automatically. Also, broadcasters looking to rebroadcast clips or montages can use the caption lookup service to retrieve captions from the original broadcast.

A smart captioning workflow can ensure 100-percent accuracy for content that is streamed online and distributed on social media channels. It also provides a better user experience for not only the deaf and hard of hearing, but also for the millions of people that watch videos from their smartphones and tablets every day without audio. In environments where users on laptops and mobile devices don’t want to—or can’t—turn on the volume, closed captioning allows them to watch a sound-free show and expands the providers’ audience, creating a much larger audience through online viewing.

With so much content on streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo and the like, closed captioning technology is an industry set to take off. Streaming services source content from around the world. To reach a global audience, providers must include caption services. Thanks to closed captioning, there are many good programs available regardless of the language spoken. Captioning opens avenues for content providers to reach a global audience.

Another factor driving the use of closed captioning is the creation of metadata. Closed captioning and its creation of metadata increases the searchability of an asset, facilitating SEO for video assets. For content owners, this increases the visibility of their video. Users can locate desired content they want with ease. Enterprise video platforms within large corporations is another growing area where the use of closed captioning and subsequent metadata increase the ease of locating desired video assets.

Recently, the use of online video in the enterprise has seen exponential growth driven mainly by improved bandwidth and processing power. A typical information workplace uses on-demand video/live streaming as part of its regular executive and HR communication, marketing and training activities, etc. Unified communication solutions that feature videos are also growing fast and intensifying this growth. Today, it’s safe to assume that an average large corporation sits on a library of more than 10,000 hours of internally created videos that could represent storage of about 20 to 30 terabytes. With the intensification of video creation, archiving needs will only increase. The integration of closed captions on such enterprise videos adds value because they’re easy to comprehend, and simultaneously, good metadata makes it easy to locate a clip from such an extensive library.

Online video providers (OVD) and subscription video on demand (SVOD) services with large amounts of footage can benefit from cloud-based subtitling by utilizing automated speech-to-text capabilities for increased efficiency and high-volume handling, along with the ability to deliver multiformat or customized versions for integration directly into existing workflows. With Digital Nirvana’s Video Logging service, media production houses and producers with large amounts of footage can improve their editing efficiency, as well organize content and the discoverability within their data centers. The company’s cloud-based Closed Captioning service uses audio fingerprinting to automate near-live synchronization of live broadcast captions with the ability to revise the text. Automated speech-to-text conversion coupled with state-of-the-art workflow and experienced captioners reduce the time and cost to publish, provide better search engine discoverability—while complying with broadcast guidelines.

By using an automated captioning service, content creators can not only comply with all FCC guidelines, but also they can reduce the time and cost to publish, while providing a greatly improved user experience and search engine discoverability.

Hiren Hindocha is CEO and President of Digital Nirvana.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—With new FCC rules on closed captioning recently taking effect (see sidebar), the biggest frontier for accessibility is live streaming of content. But tighter budgets, shorter deadlines and issues of accuracy remain hurdles. Fortunately new technologies including machine learning and speech recognition are helping broadcasters and programmers overcome these obstacles.

WHO’S RESPONSIBLE?
In 2016, the FCC split the responsibility of closed captioning between content creators and the multichannel video programming distributors (MVPD) responsible for the content’s distribution. Programmers however have been seen as being primarily responsible—up to the point of hand-off to the MVPDs at least—for ensuring that the captioning of the content is accurate, synchronous, complete and is placed so that it does not block other important visual content.

Additionally, the issue of accuracy goes back to 2014 when the FCC issued standards related to the accuracy, timing, completeness and placement rules for captioning. At that time the FCC determined that captioning must match the program audio, (including any slang), as well as nonverbal information that included speaker identification, descriptions of the music, sound effects, and even attitudes and emotions of the speakers along with audience reaction.

“In fact, the FCC said that the captions should be as accurate to ‘the best of your ability,’ but there have been no hard or fixed rules on what is actually considered ‘best,’” said Ralph King, president of Comprompter News and Automation of La Crosse, Wis. “The standards that the FCC are requiring are somewhat nebulous.”

There are other gray areas too. MVPDs are in essence responsible for then ensuring that the captions are passed through with the captioning intact and more importantly, in a format that can be recovered and displayed by decoders.

Although there have been similar regulations, according to Giovanni Galvez, product manager at Telestream in Nevada City, Calif., the difference now is “content providers have less time to ensure that the captioning is where it needs to be.”

Hiren Hindocha, CEO of Digital Nirvana

Bottom line: as programming moves from on-air to online, captions must be present and accurate.

“If the caption does get lost there isn’t an easy way to get that back, so what we are looking at already is a way to provide captioning at the source and use digital fingerprinting technology that can allow these to be reconnected together,” said Hiren Hindocha, CEO of Digital Nirvana in Fremont, Calif.

CAPTIONING AS META TAG
A major advantage of closed captioning of content is that as it is uploaded online it can help media reach a particular audience.

“Captions are being uploaded to social media, and while it presents a challenge as some outlets like Twitter don’t currently support captions, it is another way for content discovery,” explained Galvez. “It is now seamless, scalable and compatible with various delivery mechanisms, but there is still the 8–12 hour deadline [according to new FCC rules] and there needs to be the horsepower to handle that demand.”

The possibilities this can offer for content providers have yet to be seen.

“Even now, closed captioning is a bit of an afterthought,” said Juan Mario Agudelo, vice president for sales and marketing at the National Captioning Institute, a non-profit advocacy group based in Chantilly, Va. “Right now the biggest problem is that there isn’t a set number of services that everyone can use equally.”

Moreover, the need for live captioning will only increase, especially as a lot of the demand is now driven from content producers who are working with smaller budgets than traditional broadcasters. This is where the use of technology—notably that driven around speech recognition—will likely increase.

“There’s a lot of interest in automatic speech recognition, which operates at a fraction of the cost of live human transcription,” said Bill McLaughlin, vice president of product development for EEG in Farmingdale, N.Y. “This is why EEG has become a direct provider in that market with its Lexi Automatic Captioning service, and why it also has customers utilizing third-party speech engines to feed our caption inserters. This Lexi model further can offer value because it is a pay-as-you-go cloud-hosted service with continuous automatic updates based on global learning, not just a local software package maintained by a single content provider.”

ENCO’s enCaption 3R4 produces real-time captions without any advance preparation work, and without the expense of live captioners or signers.

Telestream captioning solutions include its Vantage Timed Text Flip, Lightspeed Live Capture and Vidchecker, which 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 the captioning from live programs during the original broadcast. Telestream software can also export embedded captioning into .mp4 files for OTT delivery.

ENCO, a broadcast systems provider in Southfield, Mich., has also replaced the traditional video stenographer through live automated captioning to serve hearing-impaired audiences at a lower cost.

“We turn audio into captions through live speech detection, and our enCaption3 systems can communicate those captions to any IP or traditional captioning encoder,” said Ken Frommert, general manager for ENCO. “The technical requirements are straightforward for any live captioning environment at the input and output of our device, whether IP, serial, or file-based. This is a concern that we can alleviate for our customers specifically related to how our technology is applied.”

According to Frommert, enCaption 3R4—which debuted at the 2017 NAB Show—produces real-time captions without any advance preparation work, and without the expense of live captioners or signers. It also utilizes ENCO’s latest enhanced speaker-independent deep neural network-based speech recognition engine to closely inspect and transcribe audio in near real time.

LANGUAGE HURDLES
The English language presents numerous challenges and this is where context is important. Machine learning can help understand by predicting the words that will be said much better than a human stenographer.

“A stenographer has to review a sentence to understand a context, and that makes it easier to understand homonyms—words that sound the same but that have different spellings and meanings,” said Agudelo. “There is still a long way to go with automated speech recognition. It is a process that is in flux and change, and it started about three years ago and will continue to be improved.”

The big leap in technology has actually been something used daily by literally billions of people—namely the smartphone.

“It is improving year on year, and [as] machine learning is coming into play, closed captioning will be closer to fully automated within two to five years,” said Digital Nirvana’s Hindocha. “Statistical data can determine what was said before and along with context, can make this technology much more accurate. The failing is still with proper nouns—such as names and places—but speech recognition tools can be preloaded with those words.”

New FCC CC Rules Tighten Ties Between On-Air, Online

ALEXANDRIA, VA.— Effective July 1, new FCC captioning rules require the captioning of online video clips from live and near-live TV programming. For live content, captioning must be completed within 12 hours from when the clip first airs on TV; for near-live, the allowable delay is 8 hours. This applies to all programming that previously aired on TV with captions, but the FCC regulations specifically exclude consumer-generated media.

These new requirements date back to 2012 when the FCC first began requiring that all IP-delivered TV programs be captioned, regardless of whether the content was full-length episodes or short clips. These requirements were phased in based on how the content was created; whether it was pre-recorded, live or near-live.

The regulations were further updated in 2014 when the FCC determined that clips to programming must also be captioned when delivered via IP, but there were some exclusions to the rule-as third-party platforms including Hulu, YouTube and iTunes were exempt. However, the clips mandate took effect in January 2016 and did apply specifically to direct lift clips of all pre-recorded content; while in January of this year montage clips were also required to be delivered with captions.

Not all stations have been compliant however.

“Given how long this has been coming I’m amazed at how so many smaller broadcast stations claimed to be unaware and therefore unprepared for these ‘new’ FCC rules,” said Ralph King, president of Comprompter News and Automation of La Crosse, Wis.

The agenda for the FCC should have been clear enough too.

“In 2014, the FCC set out a three-year agenda requiring all fully captioned traditional broadcast programming to also appear fully captioned when delivered through web and OTT services,” said Bill McLaughlin, vice president of product development for EEG in Farmingdale, N.Y. “The good news is that the technology to meet this latest deadline has been in place with most broadcasters for some time already, since all the infrastructure supporting the conversion of the broadcast captioning to web is already in place.”

Peter Suciu

This is why there will remain a balance that includes both speech recognition tools and stenographers, and in some cases for those with higher budgets and larger audiences, it may—at least in the short term—pay for the increased accuracy with a human captioner overseeing the process.

“As organizations grapple with the new mandate, their demand for highly skilled professional captioners and transcribers will most likely rise to meet it,” wrote Heather York, vice president of government affairs for captioning service provider Vitac, in a blog on tvtechnology.com recently. “After all, only humans can balance both the speed and accuracy needed to properly transcribe and sync captions to videos in compliance with the regulations. “Along with this rising call for human capital comes a demand for quality workflow automation technology to keep captioners on track, operating at the highest quality, and ensuring timely delivery and coordination between all parties.”

Improved accuracy could also come about with better direct interoperability with newsroom systems, according to ENCO’s Frommert. “This includes interoperable newsroom systems to automatically add proper nouns, such as names and places that would come across inaccurately in less intelligent workflows,” he said. “As we continue to improve the speech recognition engine with subsequent software updates, the already highly accurate output coming from enCaption3 will only get better.”

This can address issues such as crosstalk, which remains a problem for live stenographers, as a crowded stage can quickly lead to confusion on who is talking, and what individuals are saying.

This is where automated tools such as enCaption3 can determine who is speaking by correlating it to each microphone with a specific speaker, which immediately improves accuracy in live multispeaker productions.

“We’ve seen a lot of progress in the past 10 years since the first voice recognition technology was starting to be adopted, and it has really only been in the past three to four years that it has held its own,” said King. “Today’s technology can handle multiple English accents so it can address one speaker with a Spanish accent and another with say, a French or German accent, and it can handle regional pronunciations too.”

With the increasing use of graphics and split-screens comes more potential for closed captions to block onscreen tickers and other information.

“We think it is important to note this so that the captioning does not cover up the information already on the screen,” added King.

It is just one part of a very complicated set of issues that will need to be addressed in the rapidly changing environment of technology for media accessibility.

DENVER—The demand for captioning on video clips, TV programs, and live broadcasts in the United States has never been higher:

— More than 50 million Americans* report some form of hearing loss.
— One in three individuals over the age of 65 —an increasingly large segment of the American population—suffer from hearing loss.
— The prevalence of bar and gym televisions, mobile phones and social media feeds have increased the need for video captions as a convenience and the only way to reach those who prefer video without sound.

This summer, the third and final “clips captioning” benchmark hits, adding another requirement to the lives of broadcasters, programmers and content creators alike.

Effective July 1, 2017, clips of all live or near-live programming captioned on TV must be captioned when delivered via Internet Protocol.

LIVE AND NEAR-LIVE CLIPS
Live programming is content—concerts, sporting events and news conferences—being broadcast at the same time as it occurs. This also includes show highlights by sports programmers that appear immediately after the conclusion of the live broadcast. If it’s broadcast live, it’s live.

Near-live programming is content that is broadcast less than 24 hours after recording. The most popular examples of this type of programming are late-night talk shows, which are typically recorded six to 12 hours before broadcast.

EXPANDING THE MANDATE
This isn’t the first time the FCC has mandated captioning. Almost all television programs are already required to have closed captions, and the FCC has made significant headway into ensuring those captions are carried over to the internet.

Thanks to the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, all full-length captioned broadcast television programs delivered via IP, which includes streaming services such as Amazon, Apple and Hulu, must carry those captions online as well. This was followed by the FCC introducing similar requirements for clips of full-length programming. Here’s a run-down:

In 2012, the FCC began requiring all IP-delivered television programs to be captioned, regardless of whether they were full-length episodes or clips. These were phased in based on how the show was created—pre-recorded, live or near-live.

In 2014, the FCC added clips to programming that must be captioned when delivered via IP. This mandate came with some leeway—clipped programs only fell under the requirement if delivered through the programmer or content producers’ website or application, with third-party platforms such as Hulu, YouTube and iTunes exempted. However, many third-party platforms still comply voluntarily with the FCC mandate to reach as many people as possible and to give the deaf and hard-of-hearing access to their content.

The first clips mandate took effect in January 2016 and applied to direct lift clips of prerecorded content. Sometimes called a “straight lift,” direct lifts are single excerpts of captioned programs. Crucially, this rule only applied to clips belonging to one part of a program, with no other material.

In January of this year, montage clips were required to be delivered with captions. Composed of multiple direct lifts, montages are often created to serve as teasers for full programs.

The rules effective July 1of this year, however, are quite different due to the nature of the mediums.

PITFALLS OF LIVE RECORDINGS
The new FCC rules will allow clips of live and near-live videos to be distributed online without captions, so long as each video is captioned within the relevant mandated time frame.

Live programming must be captioned within 12 hours of recording and near-live within eight hours, unlike direct clips or montages, which must be captioned before distribution.

But these time frames are not for mere convenience. Captioning live and near-live programming is a different animal than prerecorded captioning. Prerecorded offline captions often have the benefit of clear transcripts, so their captions can be created in sync with the audio allowing for a smooth viewing experience. Live and near-live programs don’t have that luxury. The real-time nature of live recordings means there will always be a slight delay in the captioning. Often, the captions will correspond to words spoken earlier, rather than what is on the screen currently.

To remedy this, some programmers may attempt to clip the captions with video segments, but even this technique doesn’t completely fix the delay problem. Other live or near-live programmers may turn to automatic speech recognition (ASR) software to try to deal with the time and manpower demands of live captioning. However, ASR software has proven to be generally ineffective, sacrificing quality and accuracy for speed, which leaves those relying on captions for the full content experience suffering. Furthermore, the gap in quality caused by ASR software violates the FCC standards: Their rules state that IP captions must be of the same quality as television broadcasts.

DEALING WITH NEW DEMANDS
As organizations grapple with this new mandate, their demand for highly skilled professional captioners and transcribers will most likely rise to meet it. After all, only humans can balance both the speed and accuracy needed to properly transcribe and sync captions to videos in compliance with the regulations.

Along with this rising call for human capital comes a demand for quality workflow automation technology to keep captioners on track, operating at the highest quality, and ensuring timely delivery and coordination between all parties.

Here are some ways to find the tools and talent to keep your broadcasts in compliance:

• Hire a 24/7 live captioning service, which guarantees quality within a turnaround of six hours or less. Many of these services also offer API integrations with the programmer’s video distribution platform.
• Utilize a secondary live-captioned feed during the broadcast for clipping and offsetting captions to match the video more accurately.
• Deploy a software solution that enables broadcasters to resync the live-captioned text to match the video or clip segment.
• Acquire captioning software and perform your own clip captioning.

On July 1, the final mandate for captioning video clips will go into effect, potentially adding stress to broadcasters’ already demanding profession. But nothing matches the stress of realizing you aren’t in FCC compliance until after the fact. Now is the time to prepare your staff and workflows to accommodate the live captioning mandate—and to ensure your content is accessible for everyone.

*Extrapolated from the 2011 Johns Hopkins study to current census.

Heather York is vice president of government affairs at VITAC, the largest provider of real-time and offline captioning products and services in the United States. 

MENLO PARK, CALIF.—In an effort to make Facebook more accessible to those with disabilities, the social media network has added closed captioning capabilities to its Facebook Live broadcasts. Non-live videos previously had this ability, but using an automated captioning tool, closed captioning is now available for those who want to include it.

Read the full story on engadget. 

WASHINGTON—Groups serving the deaf and hard-of-hearing community want to make sure that closed captioning requirements carry over to voluntary ATSC 3.0 rollouts. The groups filed comments on the FCC proposal that is allowing broadcasters to start rolling out the next gen TV standard, saying that they believe the transition can occur without disrupting closed captions, but want the FCC to make sure that happens.

To read the full article, visit TVT’s sister publication B&C.

For more on this subject, visit our ATSC 3.0 silo.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—EEG’s is now offering closed captioning service from the cloud, announcing the launch of Lexi. This cloud-hosed service connects existing EEG closed caption workflows with Automatic Speech Recognition technology, including support for on-demand ASR closed caption delivery through EEG products for live and offline material.

Lexi provides real-time transcriptions for live workflows based on audio supplied from any iCap connected devices. For offline or non-live captioning, subscription access to Lexi is built directly into EEG’s Scribe Closed Caption Editor. EEG advertises that the Lexi is capable of delivering more than 90 percent accuracy for English and Spanish, and can be used as part of a hybrid approach, with Lexi data being automatically interspersed with existing captions from a teleprompter system and/or human captioner.

The model supports hardware HD-SDI closed caption encoders from EEG, Falcon streaming encoders, Alta transport stream software, third-party iCap integrations and proxy devices that links other third-party hardware caption encoders to iCap.

EEG will offer the Lexi service in “Solution” and “Emergency” tiers. The Solution Tier provides 24/7 live ASR captioning, while the Emergency Tier offers a few hours of service monthly as a live caption backup for emergencies.

MONTREAL—The Monarch HDX from Matrox has added another talent to its quiver, with the company announcing the integration of closed captioning capture and streaming support. This will provide closed captioning abilities to broadcasters while streaming or recording.

With this new feature, the Monarch HDX retrieves captioning data from the SDI Vanc or line 21, then embeds the data within the H.264 essence as CEA-608. The content can then be streamed to media servers or content delivery networks, like Wowza, YouTube Live or Ustream. It can also be recorded as MOV/MP4 files.

This firmware update for the Monarch HDX system is now available for download from the Matrox website.

SOUTHFIELD, MICH.—WCTV and WCPS, public, educational and government (PEG) channels in Chesapeake, Va., are going live with their closed captioning capabilities with the help of Enco’s enCaption3R3 system.

The enCaption3R3 system is designed to deliver captioning in near-real-time and near total accuracy. The system also has the ability to learn the correct spellings of unique words, including local streets, landmarks and names of local leaders.

WCTV covers local government events, while WCPS handles local school board coverage and other related school activities. The enCaption3R3 is being utilized wherever local government or school board meetings are held, like broadcast studios, City Hall, the School Administration building and the Chesapeake Conference Center.

The stations use a Blackmagic Design 40x40 house router to move audio sources into or out of the enCaption device, thus sending a live audio feed with the caption data/text through a serial connection to an Evertz HD9804 closed captioning encoder. The encoder marries the video, embedded audio and caption text data to send to an automation system for SDTV broadcast.

With the addition of the enCaption3R3 system, two out of three of Chesapeake’s PEG channels have live closed captioning capabilities.

SOUTHFIELD, MICH.—Based off of its enCaption3 system for live speech-to-text conversion, ENCO has announced that it has delivered a new automated closed captioning system that works with pre-recorded content, the enCaption3R2. New features for the next-gen system include an updated speech engine and a file-based ingest workflow.

The enCaption3R2’s speech engine is based on deep neural network acoustic modeling for greater accuracy, including enhanced representation of voice and punctuation for the hearing impaired. The system’s file-based ingest workflow is used to automate the process of preparing content for captioning.

Additional features of the latest enCaption system include greater spelling accuracy with direct verification with news rundowns; is speaker-independent; and has the ability to place content online.

ENCO will demonstrate this new product at the upcoming IBC 2016 show in Amsterdam at their stand, 8.A59.

HAMILTON, N.J.—Without closed captioning, the deaf and hard of hearing cannot fully appreciate the video they’re watching. When closed captioning is displayed onscreen, viewers can read text of the dialogue while watching the video. And for international video distribution, foreign language captions and subtitles are essential for viewer accessibility.

In fact, this service is so important that a recent U.S. law—the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA)—stipulates that any video that’s been broadcast on television must have captions when it streams over the internet. And the FCC’s closed-captioning quality rules require non-live programming to have captions that are accurate, complete, in sync with the dialogue and properly positioned on-screen.

When broadcasters need to distribute a high volume of video to domestic and international markets—and IP outlets including over-the-top services, websites and mobile devices—they need a smart, automated captioning workflow that ensures regulatory compliance without quality compromises.

GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION
“Many broadcasters today want to deliver their video content internationally so it can be enjoyed by the broadest possible audience, and closed captioning is the key to making that happen,” said Giovanni Galvez, product manager of captioning products for Telestream, in Nevada City, Calif. “Where there are language barriers, foreign language captions and subtitles are a must.

“To expand viewership across global markets and ensure accessibility to everyone—whether they’re watching via TV, online or mobile—means broadcasters must properly caption or subtitle all iterations of their content for multiplatform, global distribution,” Galvez added. “Considering the scope and complexity of this task, broadcasters can save considerable time and money by using an automated solution that integrates precision captioning and subtitling as part of their existing media processing workflow.”

Telestream’s new Timed Text Flip feature leverages the company’s Vantage 7.0 media processing platform to automatically process high-quality subtitle and captioning input files—created by the customer or a third-party service—and add them to associated media in accordance with today’s broadcast, internet and accessibility mandates.

Galvez said that Timed Text Flip runs on the same automated Vantage workflow that many broadcasters already rely on in their daily broadcasting operations. And multiple processes—such as burning in subtitles, and offsetting captions to match the media following frame rate conversions—can run in parallel, with the finished files automatically landing on servers or other designated destinations for delivery.

EEg’s icap alta system is intended for closed captioning of live programming delivered via an IP workflow, with support for 4K, IP and cloud environments.CAPTIONING IN IP
As the volume of video to be captioned grows—and the rules mandating quality increase—broadcasters must manage these pressures while transitioning from SDI to an all-IP infrastructure. EEG’s iCap Alta system is intended for closed captioning of live programming delivered via an IP workflow, with support for 4K, IP and cloud environments.

“Our goal is to enable a seamless transition from the hardware-driven caption insertion we’ve relied on with SDI to a software-based closed-captioning encoder for the IP playout and distribution workflow,” said Dave Watts, marketing manager for EEG Enterprises, in Farmingdale, N.Y. “With iCap, the SDI/IP transition is just a matter of switching from our iCap SDI hardware encoder to Alta’s virtualized encoder. Since our iCap product line is cloud-driven, when a broadcaster switches from an SDI to IP workflow with Alta, their settings, account activity and closed-captioning assets that they’ve built up over time in their iCap account are preserved and readily accessible.”

The iCap product line includes the Falcon live iCap encoder that routes captions to streaming services, including Wowza Media Systems and You-Tube Live Events. It offers “pay as you go” service on demand and connects online content producers to the iCap captioning cloud. iCap products offer instant online access to a global network of certified captioners as part of EEG’s end-to-end interoperable technology network.

AUTOMATED LIVE CAPTIONING
Live, real-time captioning typically involves contracting a third-party captioning service at a cost. ENCO’s Encaption 3 is a hardware/software solution that employs a speech recognition engine to fully automate closed captioning in near real time. It does not require any voice training and produces captions with a high degree of accuracy.

“For live newscasts, it can acquire the correct spellings of important terms, like names and local places, in advance by checking the news rundowns coming from the newsroom computer system through an IP MOS-based interface,” said Ken Frommert, general manager for ENCO in Southfield, Mich. “And in breaking news or weather emergencies, when captioners might not be readily available, the system is always ready to go for a fraction of the cost of live captioners. “Since TV shows cannot air without captions, this system makes it possible to go ahead and deliver the content, which benefits all viewers.”

Encaption 3 delivers live captions as a serial data stream directly to the broadcast encoder. It can also record a file of the live captions for future use, such as editing and repurposing of captions in post for rebroadcasts and multiplatform distribution.

Volicon’s observer media intelligence Platform provides tools to monitor and measure closed captions to ensure compliance.QUALITY ASSURANCE
Digital Nirvana’s MonitorIQ media management platform has a software-based component that captures and stores the off-air digital broadcast signal along with its closed captioning. It also serves as a search engine that makes recorded video content searchable based on associated metadata, including its closed-caption data.

“Users can search on any keywords, such as names, places or other terms, to find where those words are mentioned in the video,” said Dan Wasilko, director of sales for the Fremont, Calif.-based company. “For example, local news teams or producers of magazine-style shows can search video they’ve aired—or that multiple networks and channels have aired—by using the closed-caption data in off-air video recordings to see what’s been reported on a particular subject.”

MonitorIQ also has technical components that verify the presence of closed captioning, either during live broadcasts, or while media is streaming online. If the closed captioning is lost, it promptly alerts the on-duty operator.

Digital Nirvana also offers professional closed-captioning services, such as taking video shows that have aired lived and revising their captions so they’re 100-percent accurate when they’re rebroadcast or streamed online. At th NAB Show, the company launched a new cloud-based closed-captioning service that’s available on-demand anywhere video is created and distributed. The service includes pop on and roll-up captioning for all technology platforms, and supports multiple HD and SD video and caption file formats. The service also targets non-broadcast customers, such as the educational, corporate and government markets that also need to caption video programs they’ve created for online and social media distribution.

PROOF OF COMPLIANCE
To avoid potentially hefty fines and penalties, broadcasters must comply with all laws, mandates and quality rules related to closed captioning. With continuous recording of a broadcaster’s on air signal, Volicon’s Observer Media Intelligence Platform provides tools to monitor and measure closed captions to ensure compliance.

“This recorded media of the live broadcast provides undisputed evidence of exactly what went to air, including the closed captions,” said Gary Learner, chief technology officer for Volicon, in Burlington, Mass. “This proof can serve as an affidavit confirming regulatory compliance. Without this proof, it becomes hearsay. Broadcasters can check the system remotely to verify that closed captions are present, and it issues alerts, by a variety of means, such as texts, emails and alarms, to indicate when closed captioning has not been detected for a certain period of time, depending upon the user-configurable settings,” Learner added.

Volicon Observer also enables monitoring and compliance verification of subtitling, secondary audio tracks and foreign language captions, all of which are vital to broadcasters worldwide.

CUSTOM WORKFLOW
Dalet Digital Media Systems developed and integrated a custom workflow for CPAC (Cable Public Affairs Channels) that automates the process of adding English and French closed captioning to programming. As a 24/7 bilingual TV service in Ottawa, Ont., CPAC delivers voluminous programming to over 11 million Canadian homes via cable, satellite and wireless distribution.

“We needed a closed-captioning solution that could manage [content] from different types of workflows, including news and magazine-style shows, live and studio production, and long-form programming,” said Eitan Weisz, senior manager of operations, CPAC. “For each of these workflows, we needed to manage and maintain caption data, especially after the content has been edited or when it’s passing through another system.”

Dalet’s AmberFin advanced media and processing platform automates insertion and extraction of caption data. It also leverages Dalet MAM to manage the workflow with an emphasis on maintaining captions as metadata. Among its many automated processes, AmberFin detects ST436 data and extracts caption information to a standard SCC caption file. It also generates TTML (Timed Text Markup Language), a standardized XML structure that represents captioning information as timecoded metadata that can be cataloged, searched and modified.

According to Dalet Sales Director Frederic Roux, with TTML, “the user can directly view and search it as well as perform basic editing and correction of the caption information. CPAC now has rich automated metadata created in the Dalet system and tagged to all our content through this captioning process.”

WASHINGTON—Following the FCC’s release of new closed captioning rules, which are available here, Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler issued a statement to help clarify what entities are responsible for delivery and quality of closed captions on television.

“Today’s Commission action on closed captioning is about responsibility,” said Wheeler. “Those who produce and distribute video for television have a shared responsibility to ensure that closed captioning is both available and accurate. Likewise, this agency has a responsibility to seize on this moment in time which, for the first time in human history, offers us real opportunities to address the communications challenges faced by tens of millions of Americans with disabilities. We are making significant progress on this front and I thank my fellow Commissioners for joining me in this important work.”

These new rules are another step in Wheeler’s plan on communications accessibility. Previous FCC efforts included its rules to make deaf-blind equipment distribution program permanent, prioritized text-to-911 availability, improved accessibility of emergency information on second screen devices, and the adoption of closed captioning quality standards.

WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission will hold an open meeting on Thursday, Feb. 18, in which it expects to tackle a series of video programming and accessibility issues. Among the issues on the agenda are the expansion of video navigation choices, closed-captioning, and current state of programming diversity.

The commission is slated to vote on Tom Wheeler’s notice of proposed rulemaking on set-top boxes, or more specifically, video navigation choices. The proposal covers a framework for providing information to develop new technologies to access video content.

A second report and order will also be considered during the meeting regarding the delivery of closed captions on video programming and the handling of captioning complaints.

In addition, the meeting will consider a notice of inquiry on the current state of programming diversity, primarily the obstacles of independent programmers on getting carriage on distribution platforms.

The meeting will take place on Feb. 18 at 10:30 a.m. in Washington.

OTTAWA, ONTARIO—As of Jan. 1, 2016, the FCC now requires broadcasters to close caption “straight lift clips”—video clips pulled from TV shows originally broadcast with captions—that they post online. This change comes under the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.

The good news: This requirement, plus other directives by the FCC to beef up broadcast closed captioning, is being addressed by many closed captioning software/equipment vendors today. The latest iterations of their solutions, which are also being enhanced to deal with the newest video streaming formats, will be unveiled at the 2016 NAB Show in April. Here’s an advance look at what they’re bringing to Vegas.

COMPROMPTER EXPANDS ‘CAPTION CENTRAL’ TO SUPPORT MULTIPLE VOICES LIVE

Comprompter is introducing a multi-person version of CC2 at this year’s show.

Known for its pioneering work in developing computer-driven teleprompting, Comprompter has since moved into the closed captioning arena with its Caption Central software. Version 2.0 of the company’s Caption Central software, which was introduced at the 2015 NAB Show, uses Nuance’s voice recognition software engine to reduce the need for live human captioning. CC2 achieves this by having each on-air announcer do an off-air seven-minute “voice training session” with the CC2 software engine, allowing the system to recognize and correlate the announcer’s distinct speech patterns.

“When announcers do their training sessions conscientiously, we can achieve 98 percent accuracy translating voice into text,” said Ralph King, Comprompter’s CEO. “This includes having the station staff add their local vocabulary of ‘People, Places and Things’ into the Nuance dictionary, so that we know those names and how to spell them.”

Comprompter is introducing a multi-person version of CC2 at this year’s show. “Our new system will use a powerful voice server to convert voice-to-text and will serve up to eight people at a time,” King said. “The 'Caption Central Multi' was designed to handle segments and shows with multiple talents that are basically unscripted with people just speaking off the cuff about cooking, politics or swapping jokes, or whatever."

EEG BRINGS iCAP TO LIVE PRODUCTION IP VIDEO

iCap from closed captioning provider EEG, marries real-time transcribers (both human and machine-based) to broadcast audio streams, allowing broadcasters to get the kind of expert real-time live captioning they require, without the use of phone lines. The company provides the necessary onsite hardware (e.g. the EEG HD492 iCap encoder), or virtual implementation to the broadcasters, and provides iCap cloud access to the transcribers for access to the broadcast stream and return of caption data.

At the NAB Show, EEG will spotlight the first iCap-encoder for encoding closed captions to live production IP video, according to Bill McLaughlin, vice president of product development for the Farmingdale, N.Y.-based company. The new iteration will support “both compressed MPEG transport streams and uncompressed standards such as ASPEN and VSF TR-03, which both use the SMPTE 2038 standard for ancillary tracks,” he said.

EEG launched iCap in 2007, and the product has since evolved in order to keep up with the latest workflow requirements of broadcasters. “The captioning piece must be flexible enough to move seamlessly across platforms as the industry changes,” said McLaughlin. “As a cloud service, iCap is always adapting to new standards so it can be delivered how it is needed. Having this kind of flexibility in any service today is key.” (EEG’s iCap technology was recently integrated in Imagine Communication’s Versio integrated playout platform.)

ENCO SYSTEMS’ VOICE RECOGNITION ENGINE REQUIRES NO TRAINING

Most voice recognition systems for closed captioning typically require some form of training before being deployed. Everyone whose voice is to be automatically converted into text must first plug in a computer microphone and read a range of words into the software, so that it can recognize their speech patterns later when spoken on air.

ENCO Systems’ enCaption3 voice recognition system—which will be showcased at the NAB Show—does not require any form of pre-training. “Just set up the enCaption3 system hardware and software, and the system is ready to convert any voice it hears into closed captioned text,” said Julia Maerz, ENCO Systems’ head of international sales. “This is because enCaption 3 is a fully automated, independent speech recognition system that has the power to convert any voice to text.”

Maerz added that enCaption3 can connect to newsroom systems to get proper spellings of locale information for street names. “We output directly to live closed captioning encoders or output to captioning software like Adobe Premiere,” she said.

NEXIDIA ENHANCES CLOSED CAPTION QUALITY

In a world where broadcasters have to produce closed captioning for both OTA and OTT playout—and do more to keep up with the FCC’s tightening closed caption requirements—Nexidia QC is a headache reliever. The reason? The company’s Illuminate software—comprised of QC, Align, and Comply modules—actively analyzes video files to check on the accuracy of existing closed captioning, by comparing it to the file’s audio tracks.

Tim Murphy, Nexidia’s senior director of product management

“Nexidia Illuminate can verify which language is being spoken on the audio track independent of the file’s metadata, and check the presence of video description as well,” said Tim Murphy, Nexidia’s senior director of product management. “An included REST API and integrations with the leading workflow automation and broadcast compliance solutions enables easy integration into a client’s environment.”

Nexidia will show various Nexidia Illuminate demonstration cases at the NAB Show, to illustrate to delegates just how well the system works in practice. In concert with Volicon (see below), Nexidia will also unveil an integration of Volicon Share and Nexidia Align to align captions for reuse in broadcast, IP and or OTT distribution.

TELESTREAM ADDS CC/SUBTITLING CAPABILITY TO VANTAGE

For the NAB Show, Telestream is adding the closed captioning capabilities of its MacCaption (Mac)/CaptionMaker (Windows) standalone platforms to the company’s Vantage Media Processing Platform. “Branded as ‘Timed Text Flip,’ this new module will bring integrated closed captioning technology into the Vantage workflow," said Giovanni Galvez, Telestream’s captioning product manager, adding that the feature will also be added to Vantage Cloud.

At the upcoming NAB Show, Telestream will showcase the new ‘Timed Text Flip’ closed caption module for its MacCaption (Mac)/CaptionMaker (Windows) standalone platforms. These closed captioning services are being added to its Vantage Media Processing platform.

As well as offering MacCaption/ CaptionMaker’s existing suite of closed captioning tools, Timed Text Flip will provide some enhanced capabilities. For instance, "one of the things we¹ve added is a way to easily convert timed text data to burn-in subtitles; those that are always seen with the video," said Galvez. This is aimed at broadcasters and program producers delivering content to non-English language markets, who need to "burn in subtitles" for the market’s local language users.

"Broadcasters concerned about meeting the FCC’s requirement to close caption ‘straight lift clips’ can relax," Galvez added. "We have products that make the edits and keep the captions in an automated way," he said; namely, MacCaption/CaptionMaker, Timed Text Flip, and Post Producer.

VOLICON TEAMS WITH NEXIDIA TO MONITOR CAPTIONING QUALITY

The FCC’s ongoing changes to its closed captioning policy indicates the commission’s intention not just to extend close captioning to the Web, but also to enhance and improve the quality of broadcaster-driven closed captioning on all media—and to demand such performance from broadcasters on a 24/7 basis.

With this in mind, Volicon has teamed with Nexidia to develop an automated closed captioning monitoring solution that constantly compares a video’s closed captioning text with its audio track. The product, which will be unveiled at the NAB Show, achieves this degree of tech magic by combining “phoneme-level” speech technology with content monitoring and logging. (A phoneme is “the smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word,” according to Merriam-Webster.) This analysis is performed when the content is ingested, with the broadcaster/playback provider being alerted to specific discrepancies and where in the media/closed captioning file they are located.

“If the captioning and the audio track don’t match, you get an alarm and the discrepancy is logged,” said Andrew Sachs, vice president of product management for the Burlington, Mass.-based company. “You get this data before the content goes live, so that you can correct it and be compliant with the FCC’s rules.”