We really enjoyed this presentation from Imagine Communication's panel on virtualized master control for broadcast at IBC 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphV55lkIz0
The panel includes a few mentions of live closed captioning integration as a key to full virtualization. A timely message, with the recent integration of iCap into Imagine's Versio Cloud.
There are a lot of interesting points to make about the benefits of cloud broadcast architecture, and so the need for virtualized, all-IP caption encoding has not been mentioned many places. (You can imagine that with our years in captioning, we've come to terms with not being the focus of the headlines after most trade shows.) Yet captioning remains quite literally a "must-have" feature, and in order for big infrastructure trends like virtualization to fulfill their promise of efficiency and cost savings, it is very important that these unsexy essential services also migrate smoothly.
The alternative to a well-planned native solution in captioning and similar fields winds up being legacy gear being tacked on to the back of a spiffy new virtual plant. Pretty soon, racks of still-essential telephone audio couplers, modems, and SDI processing gear are sitting next to that ol' tape robot in that space behind the main racks where your staff was hoping a foosball table could fit once the functions moved to the cloud.
We recommend iCap! It goes well with foosball.