MELBOURNE, Australia—Ai-Media Technologies Limited, a global provider of technology-driven captioning, transcription and translation services, has announced that it has renewed its exclusive agreement with Australian broadcaster Seven Network (Seven) for an additional five year term.
As part of the new five year contract, Seven will extend its use of Ai-Media’s offerings from traditional premium Services to technology products iCap Encode, Lexi and Smart Lexi, and an enhanced use of SubSilo
In addition, Seven will be the first free-to-air Australian broadcaster to transition to Ai Media’s iCap network, adopting the full suite of technology products, targeting a Q3 FY23 roll-out, the companies said.
“We are extremely pleased to have signed this renewal which showcases the strength of our new iCap product offering as we continue to deliver the best possible captioning quality with the highest published uptime in the industry,” explained Ai-Media co-founder and CEO Tony Abrahams. “Since 2016 Ai-Media has been the exclusive provider of captioning services to Seven across all markets. This renewal includes a significant technology uplift delivering improvements in scalability and cost for Seven.”
“Through the pioneering use of our SubSilo product, team members at Seven can now use embedded captioning to search extended video archives, he added. “The full suite of Ai-Media’s products and services will be available to Seven once we complete the transition to the iCap network, which is expected to occur in Q3 FY23.”
“The agreement further accelerates our technology-driven growth through recurring revenue and speeds up the transition of our top customers to the iCap network and SaaS products Lexi and Smart Lexi,” Abrahams also explained. “This will also deliver viewers much more choice of captioned content, helping to deliver further on our vision of making the world’s content accessible for everyone.”
An element of the Seven renewal was Seven’s organization-wide implementation of SubSilo, which uses Ai-Media’s captioning to power automated search across Seven’s extensive media archive.
“We have partnered with Ai-Media since 2016 and have ensured that our captioning is the best possible quality for all of our viewers who rely on this important service,” said Seven Network director of broadcast operations. “Our focus is on tight technical integration between our systems, Ai-Media and our playout operations. This renewal, further enhances the ability to deploy accurate automated captions across more content as well as improved media search for Seven’s internal teams by utilizing technology from Ai-Media’s recent EEG acquisition.”
Ai-Media also reported that under the five-year renewal agreement, Ai-Media will deliver all captioning across the Seven network at lower costs to Seven, driven by the rollout of the iCap network through the iCap Encode products and the automated Lexi and Smart Lexi SaaS products.
In addition, Seven will purchase hardware from Ai-Media and will pay a monthly captioning fee (for an agreed amount of captioning) and a monthly equipment support fee. Seven will continue to benefit from the integrated SubSilo product which fully indexes archived content across the network with “search by caption” functionality available 24 hours after broadcast, the companies said.
