Sign-Language Channel Creates Closed Captioning In-House With Telestream

Telestream announced that DPAN.TV (The Deaf Professional Artists Network) has chosen its MacCaption closed captioning software to handle all of its own closed captioning and subtitling needs in-house.  

A non-profit company co-founded by Sean Forbes and Joel Martin 10 years ago, DPAN.TV produces a high volume of shows, including original video series, such as DTV News, Tru Biz entertainment news, Between the Lines public affairs, ASL Music Videos and Today in History — all specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing community.

“DPAN.TV is about making news and entertainment fully accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, a community that has long been underserved by traditional media,” explains Forbes. “We engage deaf and hard of hearing viewers by using both ASL (American Sign Language) and high quality closed captions so they can choose the way they prefer to consume the media. We also provide program audio so that hearing individuals can also enjoy our channel.”

One of the biggest operational challenges facing DPAN.TV was the labor and cost associated with adding captions to a large amount of non-live video. Their tight budget and tight timeline didn’t allow for video files to be sent out to third-party captioning companies. These services can be costly, especially when a quick turnaround is required for time-sensitive content like news stories. With a staff of just 30 people—many of whom are deaf or hard of hearing—DPAN.TV is now able to handle its own closed captioning and subtitling needs in-house on a single Mac running MacCaption software.

MacCaption allows even non-tech-savvy users at DPAN.TV to author and create closed captions and subtitles of the highest quality, with confidence that they comply with all legal mandates and quality rules. MacCaption makes it easy for anyone to import a transcript of the video from a plain text file or teleprompter copy, and editing or correcting existing captions is as simple as making changes in a word processor. Captions are automatically synchronized the with the video, and encoding into TV and Internet video formats like MP4, MOV, and MXF is an easy process.

“Captioning video properly is an art form,” says Forbes. “With MacCaption, we have all the professional tools we need to caption and subtitle video in-house. This enables us to save significant amounts of money, labor and time, and most importantly, control the quality of the captions we produce.

“We live in a world where video is all around us, on broadcast television, online services, social media and in public places. It’s time that we make all of this content fully accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing community. That is what DPAN.TV is endeavoring to do,” concludes Forbes.