Sky Racing, a world leader in multi-venue, multi-channel race & sport broadcasting, has adopted ENCO’s enCaption4 systems to assist in captioning their content with teletext following a successful 2-month trial.
A pioneer of satellite television in Australia, Sky Racing transmits to more than 5,000 outlets across Australia, and into 51 countries around the world via satellite, cable, mobile and digitally over the internet. Sky Racing, which broadcasts more than 160,000 races each year also has a reach into more than two million Australian homes.
ENCO’s enCaption4 is a patented, totally automated appliance, using speech-to-text services, automatically generating captioning inserted into their Vision. Using enCaption4, Sky Racing can provide near real-time, live captioning to its hearing-impaired audience any time.
enCaption4 uses ENCO’s latest enhanced speaker-independent deep neural network-based speech recognition engine to closely inspect and transcribe audio in near real-time.
To assist with difficult language and extraordinary horse names, Sky will be working with ENCO’s personalised dictionaries to assist with recognition and accuracy.
The latest generation of enCaption4 also offers an offline file-based mode for automatically captioning pre-recorded content, it can immediately produce captioned content in a number of different captioning file formats.
For the past few months, Sky Racing, ENCO and Professional Audio & Television, ENCO’s exclusive distribution partner in Australia and New Zealand – have been engaged in a proof of concept at Sky Racing’s Frenchs Forest HQ to test ENCO’s speech-to-text technology to ensure it was not only meeting Sky Racing’s requirements, but also fulfilling Sky’s current legal obligations set by ACMA (Australian Communications & Media Authority) when it comes to closed captioning.
Tabcorp’s Head of Media & Broadcast Technology Dennis Dovale said: “I have been familiar with ENCO and their various software solutions for many years. When we were searching for a technology solution that would meet our captioning requirements, ENCO provided a solid demonstration and immediately agreed to implement the OP47 standard required for teletext in Australia. The support from ENCO and their local representative Professional Audio & Television has been outstanding.”
ENCO’s President Ken Frommert was delighted with the news: “It is great to see our technology being deployed at Sky Racing in Australia. We thank Sky Racing for their trust, and we are looking forward to supporting them into the future.”
For a product overview of ENCO’s enCaption4 please click on this link.