At NAB 2013, AmberFin, will demonstrate how enhancements to its iCR software help meet the new FCC regulation mandating that all video content broadcast on television in the US now requires captions when it is distributed over IP.
AmberFin has teamed up with Softel to improve the efficiency and reliability of otherwise difficult captioning and subtitling workflows. The integration of Softel's Swift vTX with AmberFin's iCR supports transcoding to a wide array of media formats whilst delivering the correctly formatted subtitle, caption and ancillary data, with a rich feature set that fits easily into any broadcast workflow.
Bruce Devlin, AmberFin's CTO and co-author of the MXF format explains: "Recent FCC regulations indicate a worldwide trend towards regarding captions as a critical element of the OTT discussion. However, captions rarely increase the revenues of broadcasters or content owners. They are an add-on service that is in many cases required by law. We are entering a world where multi-platform delivery to broadcast, VoD and web streaming channels now also require captions and subtitles by law. Unfortunately, the traditional captioning workflows that go around the outside of the main workflow are now too expensive and time consuming to justify when the number of platforms is growing and the number of viewers per platform is inevitably diminishing."
To reduce operational costs, improve productivity and deliver quicker ROI, broadcasters and content owners need to ensure they have a full captioning/subtitling solution ready as they make the transition to file-based workflows. This way, significant savings can be achieved by processing video, audio and subtitles/captions together on the same platform, and the integrity of subtitle or closed caption data can be securely preserved as video files are converted from one format to another.
