Captioning Solutions at NAB Help Broadcasters Meet New Government Mandates

By most accounts, broadcasters and multichannel operators are making every effort to meet the FCC-mandated rules that call for all video content, whether on TV or the Internet, to include closed captions and/or subtitles by the end of this year or face a fine.

On February 20, 2014, the FCC set new rules for TV closed captioning to ensure that viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing have full access to programming. This followed a Report and Order on January 13, 2012 adopting rules for closed captioning of video programming delivered using Internet protocol (the IP closed captioning rules). These new closed captioning rules became effective on April 30, 2012. In addition, as of July 1, 2002, the FCC required all digital television (DTV) receivers to include closed captioning display capabilities.

Grass Valleys Swift TX transmission solution facilitates the playout and transmission of subtitles and closed captions in the full range of global formats and standards.

All of these rules are part of the 1996 Americans With Disability Act, for which Congress required video programming distributors (cable operators, broadcasters, satellite distributors and other multi-channel video programming distributors) to close caption their television programs. In 1997, the FCC set a transition schedule requiring distributors to provide an increasing amount of captioned programming, as summarized above.

The Commission also adopted measures to ensure that people who are deaf or hard of hearing have greater access to local news programming. This includes making broadcasters convert teleprompter scripts into captions. This pre-scripting requirement has resulted in captioning for some news programming that previously aired uncaptioned, including sports, weather, and most late-breaking stories. In addition, the new rules require that crawls and other visual information be used to provide visual access to certain news segments that cant be pre-scripted.

The new FCC rules apply to all television programming with captions, and include standards for accuracy, synchronicity (timing), program completeness, and the physical placement of closed captions.

With this in mind, at this years NAB Show several companies will show new and innovative ways to create or add captions to archived and new file-based programming.

In booth N605 (the Digital Broadcast booth) Comprompter will show its voice-activated Caption Central platform, which, the company says, includes at least six methods of manually ingesting voice captioning, newsroom computer systems, as well as keyboard and text files. We must take what we get from the NRCS in terms of spelling; the same for pre-saved audio and text files. We must depend on the typists level of accuracy.

Comprompters Caption Central includes voice recognition capability that is 70-85% accurate for an untrained voice (depending on accents and clarity) and 95% for a person trained in captioning and transcription.

But for general purposes, Caption Central is just as accurate as your news staff is using your NRCS to provide caption output, says the company website. The same goes for a live typist or pre-stored text files--unless there is time to edit them prior to air.

Comprompter said its Caption Central includes voice recognition capability that is 70-85% accurate for an untrained voice [depending on accents and clarity] and 95% for a person trained in captioning and transcription. It includes the ability to learn voices, but it can never be 100% accurate, according to the company. (Unofficially, the FCC Disability Rights Office is looking for about a 90%+ standard for Closed Captioning.)

Each individual persons voice does not have to be trained to use Caption Central as the system includes a Mixed Profile so that you do not have to switch Profiles when you switch speakers. In fact, Comprompter is nearly ready to identify speaker names as they come into each of the softwares four channels.

Caption Central also includes a built-in Spell Checker, but the company also recommends using Microsoft Word on the Closed Captioning computer so that users have access to the Word Dictionary and its hundreds of thousand of words. It also features a Customizable Vocabulary that allows you to spell and pronounce proper names of people, places and things that apply to newsgathering. Once learned, Caption Central knows who and what these are.

So what happens if a station is using its newsroom system-generated captioning and the anchors suddenly go off script? Caption Central has an Ad-Lib Button that instantly switches the studio mics on and begins transcribing out to the Captioner what they are saying. As far as scripts go, the weather guy and half the sports show are typically ad-libbed, so this would be a great place for the Ad-Lib to kick in.

Users do not have to physically sit in front of the Caption Central computer during a newscast. Once set up, the computer runs fairly automatically. The AD-LIB button can be triggered Off and On remotely from any designated computer screen.

Grass Valley, now owned by Belden, will show its Softel Swift Create V8 caption and subtitle creation workstation and its Swift TX transmission solution at NAB 2014 (Booth N2513).

Swift Create V8 is a major revision of the companys existing workstation. If now includes more than 20 new functions that simplify the processes required to create, repurpose and manage captions and subtitle files for multiplatform use.

With Swift Create V8s Direct2Web feature, captions and subtitles for content delivered to devices such as smartphones and tablets can match the quality of their traditional broadcast channel equivalents. The new software is also particularly adept at dealing with the minor captioning changes required to accompany video content delivered to a variety of platforms.

Swift Create V8s Swift Smart File Han

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