IBC 2017: Ericsson launches flagship live captioning platform Subito
At IBC, Ericsson is launching its flagship live captioning platform, Subito, as a standalone service in the cloud, offering broadcasters and content owners the flexibility to resource and manage their captioning requirements themselves. The new ‘Subito as a Service’ offering enables broadcasters, content owners and their captioning teams to benefit from Ericsson’s advances in live captioning and cloud technologies, providing full access to the company’s live captioning platform via the cloud and fully supported 24/7 by the company’s experienced teams and systems. Ericsson is offering training, and manage technical issues and platform monitoring, while also providing expert knowledge management, technical integration capabilities and operational support – as well as absence cover and extra burst capacity.
“With access to our state of the art captioning software, our clients can exceed legal obligations and viewers’ expectations for accuracy and availability as well as benefit from a full range of additional services,” says Steve Nylund, Head of Broadcast and Media Services, Ericsson. “Through leveraging our cloud-based service, our customers will receive instant access to our planned roadmap that adds advanced features to the platform as they become available. By offering Subito as a completely standalone service along with options to run it within public facing clouds, we can empower our customers to work in the way that best fits with their operational needs. In the UK, our existing major public service clients have reported a considerable jump in quality to levels routinely in excess of 99% accuracy.”
Ericsson has worked with Nuance to fully integrate the Dragon Naturally Speaking API into Subito, meaning new captioners can reach the highest levels of caption accuracy quickly, reducing training times and increasing quality across the board. The result is more people respeaking better quality captions than ever before.
Subito delivers accuracy, speed and loss prevention benefits for a broadcaster’s audience as well as ensuring adherence to relevant Service Level Agreements and regulatory requirements. The platform has minimal latency and offers 100% accuracy for all prepared material with full newsroom integration, with all captions recorded against running order structure for easy re-use.
As a centralized core system, Subito provides tracking status of every channel and captioner and is designed to meet the most complex regional broadcast configurations with the ability to handover seamlessly – even midsentence. The platform delivers full transcripts of all live shows with comprehensive metadata, word level timing all structured by programme – delivered as traditional STL or EBU-TT files.
The launch of Subito as a standalone cloud service complements the wider Ericsson access services portfolio. At NAB Show 2017, Ericsson enhanced its extensive media enrichment portfolio with the launch of a range of best-in-class captioning services, including Subito Vault, a single, globally accessible integrated caption production platform; Snap Captions, Ericsson’s fast offline captioning service; and Subito Conversion and Delivery Engine, a bespoke caption transcode platform that transforms files into a number of online formats.
