Thank you to all the EEG customers and partners who came by to see our products and swap insights at the 2016 NAB Show in Las Vegas.
What were the top trends we saw? For a broad view across the industry, a great interview series appeared in TV Technology, covering topics from cloud production to Ultra-HD TV, and OTT program delivery to newsgathering aerial drones. Captioning and accessibility is certainly feeling effects from industry developments, but also has a unique set of concerns with fast-evolving regulation and legislation in the United States and other major markets.
At EEG and in the captioning/accessibility space, here are the 3 major trends our customers and partners brought us:
1. Virtualization, or 'There are no Modems in the Cloud’
Many NAB customers were seeking software-only solutions from all of their key broadcast vendors, to enable a new breed of plant designs that rely on a combination of IT-centric on-premises video data centers and remote cloud-based productions solutions. Motivated by both anticipated cost savings and a desire to future-proof for planned build outs into UHD technologies, customers were beginning to spec out the virtualized equivalent of everything currently done with SDI video routing.
EEG answered this call with the new Alta line of virtualized, pure software closed caption encoding for professional IP production formats and integrated playout platforms. Alta software provides the same familiar iCap network interface to captioning service providers as our standard SDI closed caption encoder, but can operate on any standard virtual machine host, including public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Azure.
iCap has also taken on a new level of importance in a virtualized environment, as that still-popular legacy captioning option, the dial-up modem and analog phone line monitoring pair, is nowhere to be found in public clouds or in most general purpose data centers. With broadcasters and their vendors realizing the necessity of a standardized software-first approach to real-time captioning exchange, several new iCap partner deals were secured at the NAB Show, and a wave of new integrations should be arriving on the market soon.
2. Educational Media Departments are Being Asked to Caption Everything
While large broadcasters were looking to preserve existing best practices in captioning during their transition to virtualized workflow, there was also a huge increase in interest in captioning coming from smaller media entities, especially those outside of the for-profit media sector in municipal government and education.
Educational media and technology departments have been affected by a number of recent accessibility law rulings requiring captioning at live sports events, commencements, public e-learning courses, and more. These requirements often need to be implemented ‘yesterday’, and do not always begin hand-in-hand with a stable or appropriate budget.
EEG will be producing a new article series over the next few weeks describing how to get started with captioning in these situations, for both live and non-live applications. While captioning a large volume of material definitely requires money or time (realistically at least some of both!), once media departments understand the options it is often easy to present a compliance plan with realistic budgetary requirements and help students and the broader community learn about this important issue.
3. Broadcast Caption Quality and Coverage Concern
Finally, strong interest and a significant amount of confusion were still present in conversations regarding caption quality and coverage rules. In the USA these discussions centered around the 2014 FCC Caption Quality Best Practices, which is still going into effect in stages, and the recently completed schedule on the 2010 CVAA regulations for online video content.
In most respects, the FCC Best Practices have simply codified existing standard workflows in broadcast captioning. There have been a few areas where interesting adjustments have been needed:
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Live and Near-Live, Re-Purposing, and Correction: The FCC have forced many networks to re-consider policies surrounding re-airs of previously live captioned content, captioning of near-to-air content, and corrections before posting online. EEG has answered this call with a range of solutions including iCap Archives, CCRecord, and CCPlay FilePro for extracting or recording caption files, Scribe for performing quick caption edits or time-shifts, and Courier Cloud for automated caption quality checking.
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Short Promos on a Quick Turnaround: For maximum caption coverage, many networks are now captioning their promos, which may only be finished hours before air. EEG’s Courier Cloud service makes partnering with an external service provider for these captions more secure, timely, and cost-efficiently than before. Alternatively, the Scribe editor is easy to learn and can caption a short promo in only minutes, particularly with a voice-assisted transcript to begin.
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Segments Excluded from Teleprompter Captioning: Many small market broadcast news stations are allowed to source their closed captioning primarily from an ENT system or prompter. However, this can often leave gaps for certain types of segments like weather and field reports. EEG demonstrated a new system using cloud-powered speech recognition technology to cover these gaps, providing basic caption coverage across the program. While less accurate than a real-time captioning service, the Speech Automation technology can help bridge short gaps in captioning that would otherwise be impossible to fill, or can serve as a backup for situations in which a real-time captioner cannot be immediately obtained for a schedule change.