NOVI, Mich.—ENCO has acquired  TranslateTV and Sentinel Solutions from Vox Frontera, a Silver Spring, Md.-based provider of televised Spanish language captioning and translation services. ENCO says the TTV acquisition will give the company a broader reach into the growing multigenerational Hispanic television market inside the U.S. and abroad by offering broadcasters an on-premises option for advanced translation of live Spanish-language TV captioning, with plans to develop a global solution specific to AV applications. Sentinel supports cost-effective, real-time quality monitoring solutions for automated captions—an especially valuable solution to keep broadcasters compliant with FCC closed-captioning standards related to accuracy, synchronization, and completeness, ENCO added. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

TTV uses patented software to translate English closed captions into Spanish in real-time. While ENCO offers Spanish translation today within its flagship, automated enTranslate service—along with 45 other languages—enTranslate today only supports cloud-based processing for translation. Offering a fully on-premises captioning and translation system enables new business opportunities with customers that prefer to host their own systems and remain independent of the cloud. 

ENCO will leverage the same technology to develop an on-premises Spanish-language translation and captioning solution for financial institutions, corporations, government bodies and universities that restrict access to sensitive information. TTV’s open development platform will also allow ENCO engineers to make continuous speed and accuracy improvements, and add new languages moving forward for both broadcast and AV customers.

ENCO will natively integrate TTV into its enCaption automated captioning workflow in both broadcast and AV environments, which will allow the platform to be used for open captioning of meetings, classes, worship services and other AV-related events, according to ENCO President Ken Frommert.. 

“We look forward to supporting TTV’s legacy customers and bringing them into the ENCO family,” said Frommert. “Integrated with our enCaption automated captioning and transcription solution, we will enable this technology to natively accept live and prerecorded audio feeds and automatically convert them to text. Our same workflow will inject these translations onto multiple consumer platforms, presenting live, accurate captions on TV sets, desktop, laptops, and mobile devices. We will develop and innovate the TTV platform for new applications and use cases,  while bringing 24/7 product and technical support to the existing TTV client base.”

Frommert adds that with Sentinel, ENCO’s broadcast customers “can monitor and evaluate caption quality from ingest to transmission, while cleaning up inaccuracies, improving timeliness and providing documentation in response to FCC complaints.”

ENCO’s cloud-based enTranslate is available today as a plug-in to enCaption automated captioning and translation systems. Frommert expects to adapt a similar approach to TTV for its customers who want an on-premises version. All ENCO enCaption solutions leverage A.I. based deep learning and speech recognition algorithms “to deliver the most accurate and consistent live captions and translations in broadcast and AV,” the company said.

Gregory Schmidt, CEO of Vox Frontera, confirms that the company has transferred its TTV client base in the US, which includes The Tonight Show and local TV stations throughout the country, along with its TTV and Sentinel technologies. Longtime Vox Frontera Director of Engineering Dave Pinson will also join ENCO to support existing TTV customers and product development initiatives. 

“Vox Frontera has made a strategic decision to focus our company resources on other development efforts,” said Schmidt. “We know that ENCO offers best-in-class in automated broadcast captioning, and is a worthy successor that will serve our customers well.”

Albert Broadcast Services President Stu Albert poses with Nautel’s model NT transmitter.
FLORENCE, S.C.—Norsan Media is an Hispanic-owned media firm, with its core broadcast and print offices located in Charlotte and Triad, N.C. and Jacksonville, Fla. Recently the company launched the first full-time Spanish language television station for Charlotte, where the Hispanic community makes up nearly 20 percent of a total population of more than a million.

Last year, in preparing for this start-up, Norsan tasked my company, Albert Broadcast Services, a regional broadcast engineering and integration firm, to construct an all-digital low-power high-definition transmission facility for WCEE-LP. Our job was to reconstruct a formerly “dark” analog broadcast facility for digital operations by replacing virtually everything from the station’s content ingest system to its transmitting plant with state-of-the-art reliable, affordable and easy-to-manage and maintain equipment.

LEGACY REPUTATION

In evaluating digital transmitters for this project, we gave special attention to Nautel. Our company has had extensive past experience with their AM and FM transmitter lines, dating from the latest NV series all the way back to Nautel’s original AmpFet AM transmitters, and this was a key reason that we focused on Nautel’s latest broadcast entry—television transmitters for lower power applications—for this Norsan project. We’ve always been impressed with Nautel’s service and support structure, which includes an extensive documentation archives and unsurpassed technical and parts support for new and older models alike. Actually Nautel is able to provide parts for its first broadcast transmitter products. You just don’t find that level of support anymore from other transmitter manufacturers.

With this level of service and support, it was a natural decision to select a Nautel NT series transmitter for the WCEE-LP project. The NT models feature Nautel’s ProTelevision modulator, which offers seamless input failover switching for enhanced reliability, and the transmitters are also equipped with IP integration for monitoring and control with Nautel’s Advanced User Interface (AUI) system. Another factor in going with the NT series for this project was the inclusion of both conventional ASI inputs along with builtin TSoIP capability; the NT series was designed and equipped to operate in both environments.

STATION TAKES TO THE AIR WITH AN NT500

We selected a 500 Watt NT500 unit for the initial installation at WCEE-LP and a 1kW NT1 model has now been purchased and will be installed later this summer. Both of the Nautel NT products selected include the company’s Optipower enhanced adaptive pre-correction technology that optimizes linearity after the mask filter to provide enhanced RF transmission spectral purity.

Norsan Media is now relying on these Nautel NT transmitters to deliver its programming within the Charlotte market. In addition to Nautel’s advanced engineering and long-standing reputation for reliability, the decision to go with Nautel products was strengthened with the company’s unsurpassed four-year warranty on its broadcast equipment products. However, Norsan may never have to take advantage of this warranty, as performance of the NT transmitter at WCEE-LP has been rock-solid since it was first switched on and the company is looking forward to a very long and rewarding continuing relationship with Nautel products.

Stu Albert is president of Albert Broadcast Services, Inc. He may be contacted atsalbert@miller.fm.

For additional information, contact Nautel at 877-662-8835 or visitwww.nautel.com