NAB 2013: AmberFin to simplify captioning workflows

AmberFin will demonstrate at NAB next month how new 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 Internet Protocol (IP).

The company has teamed up with caption solution specialist, Softel to show how placing captions in the heart of a file-based ingest and transcode workflow can 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 into any broadcast workflow.

Bruce Devlin, AmberFin’s CTO and co-author of the MXF format, comments: “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.

“By applying the lessons we learned manipulating high-quality video mezzanine files to captions, we have developed a new breed of easy to manage captioning and subtitling workflows. Whether you need an A/53 transport stream, SMPTE-TT, OP-47 or a simple .scc file, we have an AmberFin’s iCR captioning mezzanine workflow for you.”