Looking to help broadcasters meet government mandates for the closed captioning of online, mobile and television content, Telestream, based in Nevada City, CA, has purchased the assets of CPC, a specialist in file-based, automated closed captioning and subtitling software and services.
Content producers and distributors around the world are all facing increasing demands to caption their content for broadcast, web and mobile distribution. In the U.S., broadcasters are bound by the Twenty-First Century Communications & Video Accessibility Act, signed into law in 2010.
Due to the acquisition, which has been completed (although no financial details were provided), Telestream will now add CPC’s products and technology to its portfolio of transcoding, workflow automation, live streaming and web publishing offerings. This includes CPC’s MacCaption for the Mac and CaptionMaker for Windows computers.
CPC’s MacCaption software automatically converts TV closed caption data to web closed caption data, which can then be streamed in HD quality by bandwidth providers like Akamai. This allows any media organization with a large number of archived captioned video files to reduce captioning operational time and errors by using a batch-processing mode to convert all the files in a folder to desired web captioning formats. MacCaption software can also create captions from scratch.
“Our customers at all levels need tools to author and distribute captioning in a more integrated way,” said Dan Castles, CEO at Telestream.
Founded in 1985, CPC’s employees will now work autonomously for Telestream, which will leverage its broad sales distribution and support network to expand CPC’s customer reach. Formerly based in Rockville, MD, CPC’s 10 employees relocated this week to Telestream’s east coast office in Sterling, VA.
“Closed captioning services are no longer relegated just to the linear television broadcast,” observes Ken Brady, senior vice president of Media Technology and Operations at Turner Broadcasting System, in Atlanta. “Our content is consumed on mobile, broadcast and broadband, and we constantly strive to make our captioning services available and accessible on any medium our viewers choose. Turner both creates and welcomes innovation in this important segment of our viewership.”
