Telestream Addresses Latest Regulatory Requirements with Captioning Products
MacCaption and CaptionMaker enable newly mandated captioning workflows; new product features and facelift to be shown at upcoming NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show
Nevada City, Calif.(31 Mar 2014)
Telestream, the leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, announced that its closed captioning software products meet new regulatory requirements, including video captioning quality and accuracy rules, recently set forth by the U.S. FCC (Federal Communications Commission). Since its acquisition of captioning leader, CPC, last year, Telestream has continued to develop its MacCaption and CaptionMaker closed captioning software products to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements while improving the user experience for content producers and distributors. Experts will be on hand at Telestream’s NAB booth SL3905 to discuss these regulations and to demonstrate the latest features for its closed captioning software products.
“Our captioning team offers a deep understanding of FCC and other mandates and continually applies that knowledge to our products to ensure that users comply with the latest and most stringent requirements,” said Paul Turner, VP of enterprise product management at Telestream. “Our intent is to give our customers the peace of mind of knowing that they are fully compliant, so they can focus on producing content for TV, web and mobile distribution, rather than keeping up with regulations.”
On February 20, 2014 the FCC set new, improved rules for TV closed captioning to ensure that viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing have full access to programming and to resolve concerns on captioning quality. The new FCC rules apply to all television programming with captions, addressing quality standards for accuracy, synchronicity (timing), program completeness, and placement of closed captions. The commission also adopted measures to ensure greater access to news programming in local communities, which may result in captioning for some news programming that previously aired uncaptioned.
Telestream’s closed captioning software products provide a full set of tools to help TV programmers and distributors easily address these quality issues, with particular strength in fixing some of the more difficult synchronous and caption placement issues. Even when users choose to contract out the labor-intensive process of transcriptions, captioning software is essential for other steps of the workflow, and Telestream products can help.
In addition to ensuring regulatory compliance, Telestream has developed new, improved versions of its MacCaption (Mac) and CaptionMaker (Windows) products which will be featured at the NAB Show in Las Vegas this April. The user interface has undergone a more contemporary facelift, and functionality improvements make these products easier to use for new users and experienced pros alike. New integrations allow Telestream’s Vantage customers to automate many types of captioning-related workflows, including file-conversions, which can’t be done by Vantage alone. Telestream is continuing to leverage the synergies of its Vantage transcoding technology with its captioning technology and expertise.
Support for the latest caption formats and specs, including SMPTE 2052 and WebVTT with full CEA-608 compatible caption formatting, plus CEA-708 digital caption authoring will be included in the new versions. These features build upon product and pricing improvements announced last October.
MacCaption and CaptionMaker will be demonstrated by Telestream’s closed captioning experts in booth SL3905 at the NAB Show April 7-10 in Las Vegas. Telestream is also participating in the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference where Giovanni Galvez is presenting Quality Control for Verifying Closed Caption Data in a File-Based Workflow on Monday, April 7 from 10:30-11:00 am in Room S227.
For more information about Telestream and its captioning products plus helpful resources including white papers and articles, visit www.telestream.net.
About Telestream
Telestream provides world-class live and on-demand digital video tools and workflow solutions that allow consumers and businesses to transform video on the desktop and across the enterprise. Many of the world’s most demanding media and entertainment companies as well as a growing number of users in a broad range of business environments, rely on Telestream products to streamline operations, reach broader audiences and generate more revenue from their media. Telestream products span the entire digital media lifecycle, including video capture and ingest; live and on-demand encoding and transcoding, captioning; playout, delivery, and live streaming; as well as management and automation of the entire workflow. Telestream corporate headquarters are located in Nevada City, California. The company is privately held. For more information, visit www.telestream.net.