In Broadcast - October 2020 - 28

28

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 10 | October 2020

InFile

Closed Captioning
Contributing Editor David Kirk has
a look at the latest developments for
closed captioning...

C

losed caption subtitling for TV
viewers with impaired hearing was
first demonstrated on February 15th,
1972, when the American Broadcasting
Company and the US National Bureau
of Standards showed the concept
within a normal broadcast of a crime
drama called 'The Mod Squad'.
Four years later, the US Federal
Communications Commission allocated
line 21 of the National Television
Standards Committee video frame for
the transmission of closed captions.
PBS then developed hardware that
could be used to caption prerecorded
programs. In Europe, the BBC began
to include subtitles for pre-recorded
programming in 1979, based on
the Teletext framework. Real-time
captioning of live broadcasts followed
in 1982, developed by the US National
Captioning Institute. The necessary
grunt was provided by reporters
trained to write at speeds of over 225
words per minute, allowing viewers
to see the captions within just a few
seconds of the words being spoken.
Improvements
in
speech
recognition technology over the
subsequent decades have allowed live
captioning to be partly or even fully
automated, typically using a trained
're-speaker' who paraphrases the
running commentary for input to the
automated text generation system.
Like OCR technology, it works well
most of the time but is ideal territory
for artificial intelligence programmers
until they too are replaced by AI-based
processors.
This article looks at recent
developments in broadcast closed
captioning while stopping short of the
generic speech-to-text and language
translation which have become
commonplace in the wider IT arena.
It is a highly specialised niche mostly
handled in software but with an

increasing number of online service
providers currently offering human
intelligence rather than the artificial
variety. Some of the service providers
are included, notably Red Bee Media
which has long been one of the leading
players.
AppTek's Live Captioning Appliance
is a CPU or GPU server installed
with automatic speech recognition
software. It delivers same-language
captions for live content with claimed
accuracy and speed that exceeds
manual services. The companion
Automatic Speech Recognition module
delivers same-language captions for
live content in multiple languages.
BroadStream's 'VoCaption for Live
Automated Captions and Subtitles'
is the company's first new product
launch since its acquisition of Screen
Subtitling Systems. VoCaption is
designed to support live captioners
or to provide captioning where live
captioners are not available. "We've
watched AI technology improve
dramatically over the last few
years and find it to be on a par and
sometimes better than humans with

Enco enCaption

product. This offers closed captioning,
subtitles, transcriptions and virtualised
speech for audio description. Features
include automatic captioning, timing,
and translation.
Dalet's AmberFin platform offers
closed captioning and subtitling,
supporting insertion, extraction and
open subtitling operations for US and
European formats. When needed,
captions/subtitles are converted prior
to insertion or after extraction to
match the incoming/expected format.

Dalet's Amberfin Platform

quality audio," says Broad-Stream COO
Melissa Preslar", BroadStream's Chief
Operating Officer. "When a few errors
do pop-up, the significantly lower cost
for VoCaption is too good to pass up."
Closed Caption Creator produces
closed captioning, subtitle, and audio
description software. Closed Caption
Creator is also the name of its main

AppTek's Live Captioning Appliance

EEG Video has updated its iCap
Voice which generates live caption
data from a variety of input sources.
iCap Voice is now supports languages
such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Russian, Arabic and Hebrew. Operators
can provide real-time on-screen
captioning for live events and video.
Transcribing typists or voice writers
using software such as Dragon
Naturally Speaking can now
flow text directly into
the iCap Voice window
and see it appear in real
time on the outputs of
EEG captioning products
such as the AV610
live display captioning

decoder or Falcon (an RTMP captioning
system that also supports many world
languages).
Enco's enCaption can automatically
generate captioning for video. The
latest generation of enCaption
includes an offline file based mode for
automatically captioning pre-recorded
content. Audio or video files can be
ingested and immediately output in
multiple captioning file formats or
sent for human transcription. Linking
enCaption to an electronic newsroom
system allows automatically access
of current and historical script
information to build a local dictionary
which allows the system to improve
accuracy over time. Custom packaging
can be configured to recognise
a station's specific set of words.
enCaption can automatically generate
captions via an NDI input stream and
output an NDI signal with captions
keyed directly on top of the video
stream.
Encoding.com's closed captioning
software, also called Encoding.com,
offers 'universal closed captioning
support for delivery to all devices'. The
software is designed to integrate with
any existing digital video authoring
and distribution workflow. It can be
used to extract, inject, copy and mux
closed captions tracks into text files or
digital video.
An operator can extract standard
closed caption tracks from source files
and convert them into text files, copy
closed caption or timed text tracks
from source videos to output videos,
and mux a text file with a source
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.enco.com/products/encaption http://www.dalet.com/platforms/amberfin http://www.Encoding.com http://www.apptek.com/solutions/subtitling-and-editing
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