Digital Nirvana

With up to twice the speed and greater accuracy than human stenographers, AI-based captioning has taken the edge, especially as captioning requirements for content are poised to expand. Pictured: Ai-Media’s LEXI in action.

The NAB New York Show will be back at the Javits Center after a long pandemic hiatus. Following a strong showing at IBC earlier this month, expectations around it are rising.

Vendors are emphatic that content metadata holds myriad value for broadcasters, increasing video’s findability and searchability, tracking rights and protecting against deepfakes and using AI to make the entire process easier. Above: An example of using machine learning to identify objects in video with correlating time markers. In this way, users can search across video with increasingly sophisticated queries such as “2 Persons + 7 Cars” to show all matches across an entire content library.

AI-driven automated captioning for broadcasters continues its upward trajectory of accuracy and speed, while more recently the service is evolving toward hybrid on-prem and cloud models and multi-language translation capabilities. Above, Lexi is the cloud-hosted automatic captioning service from Ai-Media.

Vendors are enriching their quality of service and quality of experience offerings to appeal to broadcasters, for whom sub-par viewing experiences are not an option. Above: Anupama Anantharaman, vice president of product management at Interra Systems, at the 2022 NAB Show with the Orion real-time monitor dashboard for QOS (Photo by Jennifer Pallanich).

In a post-Volicon era, monitoring and compliance tools have gone beyond just making sure content meets regulatory requirements, moving into new broadcast environments and rolling out features designed to ease workflows. Above: Vela’s Encompass product showing both channel and transport stream analysis to help ensure quality of service.

Vendors say broadcasters are increasingly looking to expand virtualization of their operations across the whole chain, and they’re also seeking to take that virtualization off-premises, either in their own master control hubs or the public cloud.

Viewers can be unforgiving when it comes to the quality of their video viewing experience, whether it’s OTA or OTT, though the latter presents more complicated challenges for monitoring vendors. They’re responding with an array of technologies to keep viewers from clicking away. Above: The Weather Channel was an early adopter of OTT and OTT monitoring, pictured here using an Actus OTT quality assurance solution.

Continuous advances in AI, machine learning and natural language processing have boosted automated closed captioning’s value well beyond regulation compliance. Above: The caption edit user interface for Digital Nirvana’s Trance transcription and captioning solution.

In its post-Volicon period, compliance monitoring companies vying to fill the void are expanding their offerings; tapping artificial intelligence for automation and cloud-based methods; and building more versatile tools. Above, TAG Video recently received certification to monitor Dolby Atmos.

In a post-Volicon landscape, broadcasters are scrambling to replace their compliance and monitoring services. They face vastly different regulatory requirements for OTT in doing so, but also an upside of new features including AI, on-prem, cloud or hybrid options and built-in tools for analysis and sales. Above, Mediaproxy’s LogPlayer is a cross-platform HTML5 user interface that facilitates seamless access to media and metadata across a network of global deployed LogServers.

AI- and cloud-based captioning systems offer ever-improving accuracy for broadcasters, while the real incentive to adopt them is dramatically lower costs than manual captioning workflows.

Ross Video kicks off its Ross Live series of virtual events on Tuesday, while Sony Professional Products convenes the first of three Technology Tuesdays and TAG Video Systems continues its series with Live Production and Multiviewing in the Cloud. Digital Nirvana addresses monitoring and advanced workflows for captioning and translation; Gates Air considers FM SFNs and AWS convenes three days of presentations. More events from IEEE, JW Player, MediaKind and AWS are all set for this week. For the complete listing with dates, times and registration links, visit TVNewsCheck’s Virtual Events Page. 

Compliance monitoring solution providers look to take advantage of an “unprecedented” situation after Verizon announced plans to phase out its U.S. market-leading product.

Artificial intelligence in news is evolving beyond metadata tags. It can now help news organizations find and monetize content, generate silent videos and highlights reels and even predict trending news, and ABC News and the CBC are among the broadcasters experimenting with its capabilities.

To accommodate the hearing impaired, the FCC requires stations to caption news and other live programming that they broadcast with minimal delays between the audio and captions. Some broadcasters would like to go beyond the regulatory mandate and caption all the programming they put on digital media. Automated captioning, helped by artificial intelligence, is closing in on making that a real possibility.