Closed Captioning

Encoding.com recently announced the launch of their Universal Closed Captioning solution designed to deliver an easy-to-use, full featured, automated closed captioning workflow for delivery to all devices. Supporting the various closed captioning specifications required for iOS, Android, web and set-top box devices, the solution integrates with digital video authoring and distribution workflows and offers the speed and infinite scalability of Encoding.com’s public and private cloud platforms.

Encoding.com says the company’s Universal Closed Captioning Solution is the first to support universal closed caption delivery across all devices and identifies the following capabilities as representing only a few of the many options available to customers:

• Utilize all formats including CEA-608/708, DFXP, SAMI, SCC, SRT, TTML and 3GPP Time Text
• Seamlessly integrate with any existing digital video authoring and distribution workflow
• Extract, inject, copy and mux closed captions tracks into sidecar (text) files or digital video
• Extract standard closed caption tracks from source files and convert them into sidecar files
• Copy closed caption or timed text tracks from source videos to output videos
• Mux a sidecar file with a source video to encode closed caption tracks into output videos.

Implementation of closed captioning remains a popular topic among digital video distributors as pressures have intensified to comply with the Video Accessibility Act and to reduce overall time-to-market. Recently, Netflix reached an agreement with litigators after being sued for failing to support closed captioning and agreed to achieve compliance within 2 years. This rush to compliance reflects a common trend amongst VOD providers as companies like Hulu, Amazon and YouTube race to implement closed captions. Encoding.com also has a blog post that answers some of the most common questions they get asked by customers trying to implement closed captioning.

StreamingMedia.com is gearing up to publish a featured article on the topic of closed captioning, what’s required by law and what solutions are available in the market. It’s also a topic we will have how-to sessions on at the next Streaming Media East show in May of 2013.