Ai-Media signs contract renewal with Seven Network
October 7, 2022
Ai-Media Technologies, a provider of technology-driven captioning, transcription and translation services, has successfully renewed its exclusive agreement with major Australian broadcaster Seven Network (Seven) for an additional five-year term.
Ai-Media Co-founder and CEO Tony Abrahams said: “We are extremely pleased to have signed this renewal which showcases the strength of our new iCap product offering as we continue to deliver the best possible captioning quality with the highest published uptime in the industry. Since 2016 Ai-Media has been the exclusive provider of captioning services to Seven across all markets. This renewal includes a significant technology uplift delivering improvements in scalability and cost for Seven. Through the pioneering use of our SubSilo product, team members at Seven can now use embedded captioning to search extended video archives. The full suite of Ai-Media’s products and services will be available to Seven once we complete the transition to the iCap network, which is expected to occur in Q3 FY23. The agreement further accelerates our technology-driven growth through recurring revenueand speeds up the transition of our top customers to the iCap network and SaaS products Lexi and Smart Lexi. This will also deliver viewers much more choice of captioned content, helping to deliver further on our vision of making the world’s content accessible for everyone.”
An element of the Seven renewal was Seven’s organisation-wide implementation of SubSilo, which uses Ai-Media’s captioning to power automated search across Seven’s extensive media archive.
Seven Network Director of Broadcast Operations, Andrew Anderson said: “We have partnered with Ai-Media since 2016 and have ensured that our captioning is the best possible quality for all of our viewers who rely on this important service. Our focus is on tight technical integration between our systems, Ai-Media and our playout operations. This renewal, further enhances the ability to deploy accurate automated captions across more content as well as improved media search for Seven’s internal teams by utilising technology from Ai-Media’s recent EEG acquisition.”
Under the five-year renewal agreement, Ai-Media will deliver all captioning across the Seven network at lower costs to Seven, driven by the rollout of the iCap network through the iCap Encode products and the automated Lexi and Smart Lexi SaaS products. Seven will purchase hardware from Ai-Media and will pay a monthly captioning fee (for an agreed amount of captioning) and a monthly equipment support fee. Seven will continue to benefit from the integrated SubSilo product which fully indexes archived content across the network with “search by caption” functionality available 24 hours after broadcast.