The eight TV2 regions that serve the Danish population have installed SysMedia WinCAPS Live subtitling systems to provide subtitles for their regional news bulletins.
In response to government mandates on behalf of deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, all TV2 regions now provide the required subtitles on their main local news bulletins from 7:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. each weekday.
As part of the new systems, a WinCAPS newsroom interface imports scripts directly from the local iNews or ENPS newsroom system. Live subtitling of unscripted content is performed using the respeaking technique with the Nuance SpeechMagic speech recognition engine, as used at DR and TV2 Denmark, feeding the dedicated SpeakTITLE module in WinCAPS.
“We use a combination of live (respoken) subtitles and subtitles based on the scripts from the newsroom systems,” said Olav Helms, technical project manager with TV2 Midt-Vest. “Quite a lot of the news is prepared very close to air, so up to 80 percent of the content may need to be respoken. If there’s time in advance, then, of course, we prepare as much as we can.”
In some of the regions, there’s a 10-minute feature slot, and subtitles for this are prepared in advance.
“WinCAPS handles the switch between live respeaking and prepared subtitles very well and with minimum effort, which is important to us as we have to do it several times during a broadcast,” Helms said.
