Advanced Television

Ericsson closed captioning for US

April 9, 2015

Ericsson has announced the US launch of a closed captioning service, a service which displays text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. The company will establish a broadcast and media services hub based in Atlanta, Georgia to provide closed captioning and video description services to both domestic and international clients effective from April 2015.

Ericsson’s closed captioning services will be delivered using the company’s enterprise-level, schedule-driven software platform, which was developed in-house using market-leading speech-recognition technologies. It allows multiple captioners to prepare and deliver real-time services for clients while maximising reuse of the caption data after it has been broadcast – for example, by helping to power content discovery or enrich archive search. The platform is currently being used to deliver both live and offline captioning services for major broadcast clients, including the BBC and Sky.

Thorsten Sauer, Head of Broadcast and Media Services at Ericsson, says: “We believe that we can create significant value for U.S. broadcasters and platform operators. By ensuring their content is accessible to audiences everywhere and harnessing valuable metadata, we can power more effective content discovery and open new revenue models in a world with more platforms and more content than ever before. We are one of the largest media service providers in the world, originating more than 500 mostly complex channels, managing more than eight million metadata assets and providing leading creative services. I am excited to extend our portfolio to the U.S. market, starting with closed captioning that has a received a lot of encouraging customer feedback.”

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