Subtitling and audio description is important, yes, but how important?

First of all, it is a human right , generated by the UN and signed by most of the countries in Europe and the Americas. Nevertheless, the cost for such services on a high-quality level are enormous. Costs, or better saving costs, is the key driver for technology. This is the good for everybody who knows how to deal with it on the technical level and is bad news for those who are not prepared to deliver yet.

The “cloud” enables new services which means high bandwidth internet access with low latency and high availability is provided at any place.

Usually all broadcast related activities have to be hosted close to the broadcast production chain. This is for sure the statement of a broadcast engineer. In the past, this was true. But now and for the future, this can be moved into the cloud. Not all parts so far, but a lot.

The future will be SMPTE 2022-6/-7 where is the ancillary data standardized in ST2010-40. This will give some advantages in terms of synchronization but in 2018 this is only available in few TV stations. In most of the cases the feed must be delivered as RS232/422 or in best case via Network TCP/IP for example via the Newfor protocol.

If a broadcaster is accepting the Newfor protocol as the way to do live subtitling, a move to cloud based services can easily be performed at any time within a day time frame of a day.

The specific services wecall Access Services Cloud, should allow to create subtitles (Live, or TC based) nearly from any place in the world without time constrains. Technology wise the system must have focus on broadcast grade applications and needs.This includes scheduling systems, editorial workflows and the integration of Newsrooms (NRCS).

How does this looks like in an real world scenario?

MTG had the need to subtitle the Norwegian Handball games during the European Handball Championship in Croatia. The Subtitle studio on duty was BTI in OSLO, the broadcast facility was located at MTG in London. They were connected via a cloud based subtitle service hosted in an European based datacenter.

The subtitle inserter at MTG was connected to the cloud subtitle delivery server which was hosted in two datacenters based in Switzerland.
The subtitle person received a low-res stream of the live video via cloud to produce the subtitle in Norwegian. The subtitle stream was send via cloud to the inserter.

The service allows to provide access services already during a live show also to the audience in the studio, arena or at the event. For this kind of use cases augmented reality devices e.g. glasses or a mobile app with local based services to play audio description trigger by local events streams or via remote speakers.

Because of its flexibility, the architecture allows various other use cases for Access Services like HbbTV, OTT Services or VoD Applications. Also, automated systems such as speech recognition (ASR), Speech to text (STT), text to speech (TTS) or machine translation (MT) can be integrated in workflows.

Progressive Thinking

The scale of accessible services and automatic systems will be grow continuously.SWISS TXT is developing an audio description solution using automatic picture recognition, puppetizing of sign language interpretation with the goal of using fully digitized and autonomous representatives in TV.