LAS VEGAS–At the 2019 NAB Show, VITAC, a Colorado-based provider of captioning services, launched VPC Control Tower, what the company describes as a “first-of-its-kind” cloud-based application that allows easy, always-on connections between captioners, events, and clients, and serves as a central hub that establishes multilevel monitoring and management of client programming.
The latest part of the company’s VITAC Power Connect product line, VPC Control Tower serves as a “traffic director” for captions, ensuring that captioners using VPC Client, a new, specially developed VITAC software are routed to the proper audio and video sources as well as the correct endpoints. VPC Control Tower enables 24/7 monitoring not only of captions and caption paths, but also of the entire captioning workflow process, including captioner readiness, caption transmission, and transcript delivery, according to the company.
Launched at the 2017 NAB Show, VITAC Power Connect is part of the company’s large-scale initiative to connect, control, monitor, and report on continuous network connections between realtime captioners and live broadcasting encoders, minimizing threats such as captioning loss due to ISP outages and modem disconnects.
The first delivery, the “Connect” phase, announced at the 2018 NAB Show, was the VPC Hardener, which provided a multi-line path from the captioner to the encoder for use in troubled areas. Also in 2018, VITAC introduced the concept of VPC Control Tower, which links together captioners, encoders, and audio and video lines, and enables staff to control and monitor captions and connections at a never-before-seen level of detail, according to the company.
At the 2019 NAB Show, VITAC also introduced another feature of VITAC Power Connect, a reporting function designed to provide dashboards and reporting for clients and VITAC control teams.
