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.
