LAKE ORION, Mich.—For more than 20 years, Orion Neighborhood Television (ONTV) has been producing three public access channels serving the Lake Orion community, just north of Detroit. These PEG channels include a public access channel, education access channel, and government access channel carried by our local Comcast and AT&T U-verse systems.
With diverse programming spanning local government meetings, school board meetings, sports, concerts, graduations and our own newscasts and public affairs programs, we produce roughly 800 shows a year. Using Cablecast Community Media software, we make this programming available via broadcast, livestream, and on demand, including our own YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers. Our channels are also accessible using Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV.
As a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity, we are fortunate to have the generous support of our local government. We have a full HD production facility that we use to produce our shows, and for added revenue, we make it available for commercial use. We also teach production classes, offer internships to college students and co-ops to high school students, and provide grants to our school district’s video program to facilitate technology upgrades.
Committed to Captioning
We’re also committed to keeping our media facility up to date. For example, even though ONTV falls below the $3 million annual revenue mark—at which the FCC mandates captioning—we deem it important to make our programming more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. After evaluating our options, we chose the ENCO enCaption automated captioning solution.
We have jumped years ahead in our captioning roadmap since installing enCaption, which we purchased through a county government grant. enCaption automates both live and non-live program captioning in real time with virtually no delay. It’s readily available whenever captions are needed, including for live coverage of government and school board meetings, among other live events. It is also far more affordable than using human captioners.
As meetings are produced and recorded, our Tricaster Mini at the venue feeds an SDI video signal into the Blackmagic 40x40 SDI router in our facility. That signal is then routed through our Cablecast system into enCaption. That program output then flows to our distribution channels, including Comcast, AT&T U-verse, and all our livestreaming platforms. Since our district doesn’t conduct meetings on Friday, we take that time to download our sidecar video files for the week and attach them to our VOD program files.
On-Site Captioning
For in-person attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, we can also pump captions of the proceedings onto meeting room screens. This involves routing an NDI video signal from enCaption, with the captions over a black screen, back into the Tricaster on site. The auxiliary NDI output of the Tricaster is fed to a meeting control system, which displays it onto video screens next to and above the dais. If multiple people speak over each other, enCaption will zero in on the loudest and screen out others for clarity.
We also use ENCO’s DAD radio automation system to play out audio podcasts we produce, as well as PSAs, music and weather announcements onto our channels and Cablecast message boards. With up to 16 playback modules, DAD supports numerous workflows that include automated ingest, logging, scheduling, playout, programming control and more.
Between enCaption and DAD, we’re very pleased with the high-quality results we get from these systems. With these reliable, affordable products, ENCO has become critically important to our overall production infrastructure. l
For more information about enCaption and/or DAD, visit www.enco.com.
