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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information is available on the ENCO enCaption product page.

LAKE ORION, Mich.—For more than 20 years, Orion Neighborhood Television (ONTV) has been producing three public access channels serving the Lake Orion community, just north of Detroit. These PEG channels include a public access channel, education access channel, and government access channel carried by our local Comcast and AT&T U-verse systems. 

With diverse programming spanning local government meetings, school board meetings, sports, concerts, graduations and our own newscasts and public affairs programs, we produce roughly 800 shows a year. Using Cablecast Community Media software, we make this programming available via broadcast, livestream, and on demand, including our own YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers. Our channels are also accessible using Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV. 

As a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, we are fortunate to have the generous support of our local government. We have a full HD production facility that we use to produce our shows, and for added revenue, we make it available for commercial use. We also teach production classes, offer internships to college students and co-ops to high school students, and provide grants to our school district’s video program to facilitate technology upgrades. 

 Committed to Captioning
We’re also committed to keeping our media facility up to date. For example, even though ONTV falls below the $3 million annual revenue mark—at which the FCC mandates captioning—we deem it important to make our programming more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. After evaluating our options, we chose the ENCO enCaption automated captioning solution. 

We have jumped years ahead in our captioning roadmap since installing enCaption, which we purchased through a county government grant. enCaption automates both live and non-live program captioning in real time with virtually no delay. It’s readily available whenever captions are needed, including for live coverage of government and school board meetings, among other live events. It is also far more affordable than using human captioners.

As meetings are produced and recorded, our Tricaster Mini at the venue feeds an SDI video signal into the Blackmagic 40x40 SDI router in our facility. That signal is then routed through our Cablecast system into enCaption. That program output then flows to our distribution channels, including Comcast, AT&T U-verse, and all our livestreaming platforms. Since our district doesn’t conduct meetings on Friday, we take that time to download our sidecar video files for the week and attach them to our VOD program files.

On-Site Captioning
For in-person attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, we can also pump captions of the proceedings onto meeting room screens. This involves routing an NDI video signal from enCaption, with the captions over a black screen, back into the Tricaster on site. The auxiliary NDI output of the Tricaster is fed to a meeting control system, which displays it onto video screens next to and above the dais. If multiple people speak over each other, enCaption will zero in on the loudest and screen out others for clarity.

We also use ENCO’s DAD radio automation system to play out audio podcasts we produce, as well as PSAs, music and weather announcements onto our channels and Cablecast message boards. With up to 16 playback modules, DAD supports numerous workflows that include automated ingest, logging, scheduling, playout, programming control and more. 

Between enCaption and DAD, we’re very pleased with the high-quality results we get from these systems. With these reliable, affordable products, ENCO has become critically important to our overall production infrastructure. l

For more information about enCaption and/or DAD, visit www.enco.com.

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. 

LOWELL, Mass.—Lowell Telecommunications Corp. (LTC), also known as Lowell TeleMedia Center, is a public access TV station that operates three PEG channels. Members of the Lowell community can sign up for a membership to broadcast up to three hours of content per week. Memberships also provide access to equipment rentals and in-studio editing without an additional charge.  

The city of Lowell contracts LTC as a third-party to broadcast government meetings, which occur daily except Fridays. LTC staff monitors meetings onsite to ensure that live broadcasts go smoothly and are archived for public record. 

About 10 years ago we decided that captioning services would be a great help to our viewers, and began working with organizations to fund the initiative. 

Manual Failures
We started by using a live caption company, an expensive endeavor that paid a stenographer by the word. The stenographer was also located halfway across the country, and there was a three- to five-minute delay before captions would appear on a live meeting broadcast. The errors were enumerable, and we realized that manual captioning wasn’t an ideal solution. 

We soon searched for other options that were faster, more cost-efficient, and a lot more accurate. Lowell is a very diverse community, and thick accents can produce embarrassing captioning mistakes. Daniell Krawczyk of Municipal Captioning, an LTC partner that advises PEG stations on technology, suggested ENCO’s enCaption solution. After taking it for a test drive I knew it was a perfect fit.

For one, we can now schedule captioning services for live meetings in advance. As soon as we go live, it just starts working. Previous captioning delays are now gone, and what once took three minutes to start is now instantaneous. 

ENCO’s enCaption’s native AI technology has improved speed and accuracy. Having five minutes of words appear on screens after the program ends helps nobody. The machine-learning has been very fast, and I can’t stress enough how accurate it has been compared to before. It’s one less thing to worry about.

Accent on Accuracy
The solution also works accurately on many different accents, solving one of our biggest captioning conundrums. It even gets complicated names right for the most part. When it doesn’t, we can simply input names into a word bank and the software automatically pulls up the correct name when it hears it. For example, our mayor’s name is Sokhary Chau, which we added to enCaption’s dictionary so that his name is spelled correctly every time.

Our enCaption system is installed on a rackmounted computer on-premises. The workflow is simple: The studio at City Hall sends the live signal back to LTC and into our TelVue system, which feeds enCaption to produce real-time closed captions. Besides adding occasional words to the enCaption dictionary and preparing weekly schedules, we almost never touch it. 

When we started using enCaption, we watched it constantly to see how it fared. There were far fewer errors, and we no longer received complaints from the community about delay and accuracy. We don’t even have to think about captioning anymore, which frees us to focus on other aspects of creating a great broadcast. l 

Dan Bazarian of LTC also contributed to this story. 

For more information, visit www.enco.com. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information is available on the company’s website.

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.  

MINNEAPOLIS & SOUTHFIELD, Mich.—Tightrope Media Systems and Enco Systems have agreed to a strategic partnership that is designed to help community media organizations incorporate automated closed captioning into their broadcast, online and OTT workflows.

With the new partnership, Enco’s enCaption automated captioning platform is being made available to Tightrope’s Cablecast Community Media customers at a special price. The Cablecast customer service team will also offer support for integrated Cablecast and enCaption workflows. Tightrope and Enco are expected to continue to explore other opportunities for technical integration between the two products.

Cablecast is designed to help community media organizations reach audiences across cable television channels and OTT services. With integrated enCaption technology, users will be able to add closed or open captions to live and pre-recorded content in near-real-time, according to the companies.

“[B]y partnering with Enco to offer this proven combination, we can save community media centers the time and effort of separately researching, purchasing and implementing a captioning solution,” said Steve Israelsky, president, Cablecast Community Media.

The enCaption platform, which uses AI technology for things like word recognition and spelling precision, has already been a popular service among community media organizations, like North Penn Television in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

For more information, visit www.cablecast.tv or www.enco.com.  

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.