Australian News Channel Chooses Ericsson For Captioning Services

Ericsson has signed a multi-year news captioning contract with ANC, an Australia’s 24-hour multi-channel, multi-platform news service provider. Ericsson will provide live captioning services for Sky News Live and Sky News Business, which are broadcast to 2.8 million subscribing homes across Australia on subscription television provider Foxtel.

As part of the contract, Ericsson will also provide captioning services for SKY NEWS-produced bulletins on Qantas flights. The captions will be delivered as an as-live service to ensure the news is as current and up-to-date as possible.

Ericsson now provides captioning services for four of the six national TV news outlets in Australia.

Angelos Frangopoulos, CEO, ANC, says: “We look forward to working with Ericsson to expand our captioning services and explore new technology to further improve the quality and availability of live captioning.”

Thorsten Sauer, Head of Broadcast and Media Services, Ericsson, says: “As a leading news provider in Australia, it is important that SKY NEWS’ captioning services match the quality of its editorial output. Our market-leading live captioning platform allows us to do this, by delivering the highest levels of service and quality to both our client and their audiences.

“For the first time, Ericsson’s captions will also be made available on an airline, ensuring that the latest news from SKY NEWS will be accessible to as many Qantas air passengers as possible the world over.”

Ericsson’s live captioning platform made its debut at the IBC2014 event. The real-time platform supports live captioning in various languages for broadcasters around the world by using speech-to-text, newsroom integration and rapid offline content preparation.

The enterprise-level, schedule-driven software platform, which was developed in-house, uses the best possible speech recognition and stenography technologies to power Ericsson’s live captioning services. It allows multiple captioners to prepare and deliver real-time services for clients while maximizing re-use of the caption data after it has been broadcast – for example, by helping to power content discovery and enrich archive search. The platform is currently being used to deliver live captioning services for major broadcast clients around the world.

Ericsson’s closed captioning business is one of the largest in the world, with hubs in Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the US. Ericsson has been providing captioning services for over 30 years and delivers 200,000 hours of captions every year, 80,000 of which are live. It is also the world’s largest provider of TV audio description and sign-language translation.