Broadcast Captioning
Ensure accurate, compliant captions with end-to-end solutions trusted by the world’s leading...
Next-Gen IP Video Caption Encoders
Deliver high-quality, seamless captions with LEXI AI-powered automatic captioning; facilitated by the world’s most trusted IP video encoders, ensuring reliable IP delivery.
Transitioning your workflow to IP?
Our solutions are applicable to any IP solution. Our line of Alta encoder solutions offer virtual caption encoding for next-generation workflows that are software-driven, fully virtualizable and native IP. Or add captions to any live stream with Falcon, our virtual live streaming caption encoder.
How do our IP video encoders compare?
| IP Encoder | MPEG TS | SMPTE 2110 | RTMP/S | SRT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alta: MPEG TS | ||||
| Alta: SMPTE 2110 | ||||
| Falcon |
IP Video Encoders
Perfect for use in many environments
Corporate Event Captions
Make your events and meetings inclusive and multilingual with AI-Media’s end-to-end range of...
Events & Production
Create unforgettable experiences for your attendees with AI-Media’s high accuracy, AI-powered...
Sports Captioning
Ensure fans never miss a word of the action with captions that ensure optimal accuracy by...
Case Studies
Eventage
LEXI & Falcon help global brands simplify captioning
The Challenge
Facing growing viewer demand for captions, both Eventage and act.tv needed an affordable and highly accurate solution to simplifying the process of captioning their live streams.
The Solution
Our AI-powered LEXI automatic captions and Falcon IP encoder provided both organizations with all the captioning technology they needed in one easy-to-use cloud platform. It allowed them to caption their live streams with up to 98% accuracy via an agile solution that’s quick to set up, manage and customize. Both organizations also saved significant time with streamlined cloud captioning workflows.
Products Used
- LEXI
- Falcon
Amagi
Amagi enables global reach with high accuracy captions
The Challenge
Amagi needed a better way to provide quality captioning for its blue-chip media and entertainment clients, which was essential to expanding their reach to global audiences. The company had previously used out-of-the-box captioning solutions, which were both expensive and inaccurate.
The Solution
The powerful combination of our AI-powered LEXI automatic captions and Alta IP encoder enabled Amagi to deliver highly accurate captions for its clients’ broadcasts. The integration proved efficient and scalable, allowing Amagi to meet the needs of traditional broadcasters and OTT channels. AI-Media’s end-to-end solution also helped save time and reduce costs with streamlined workflows.
Products Used
- LEXI
- Alta
Amagi
Amagi is a leading provider of cloud broadcast infrastructure to global TV networks.
Latest insights from A-Media
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From SDI to IP: How Broadcasters Can Simplify Captioning in the Cloud
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Ai-Media Adds Dynamic Captioning as LEXI Preferred Partner
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Alta is a one-stop solution which allows us to easily connect to human captioners as well as LEXI for automatic captioning.
All-in-One IP Solution
Baskar Subramanian – CEO & Co-founder, Amagi
Versatile & Easy-to-Use
“iCap Alta allowed us to satisfy the traditional broadcasters who prefer premium human captioning, as well as the newer OTT channels who want a captioning solution that is quick, easy and high quality like LEXI.”
Versatile & Easy-to-Use
Baskar Subramanian – CEO & Co-founder, Amagi
Simplified Cloud Platform
With Falcon and LEXI providing a fully cloud captioning platform, Eventage didn’t need to purchase and set up any hardware. All its production workflows were simplified – even for demanding events.
Simplified Cloud Platform
Ally Brooks – Senior Manager, Production & Systems, Eventage
Efficient End-to-End Solution
All of our captioning flows through Falcon. At act.tv we send the video from our encoder to the captioning server where it gets captioned by a human captioner or LEXI, and then on to syndication to social media. It’s that easy.
Efficient End-to-End Solution
Brad Gans – Creative Technical Director, act.tv
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
All our IP and SDI caption encoders are compatible with third-party automated and human captioning services. However, by using AI-Media’s LEXI automatic captions or human captions, you can build an end-to-end solution without the costly and time-consuming need to integrate third-party offerings.
Falcon is designed for time-limited streaming events like conferences or corporate town halls. It’s compatible with all major live streaming platforms, including Facebook Live, YouTube Live Events, Twitch, UStream, and many more. To use Falcon, you must be able to output an RTMP or RTMPS stream from a streaming media encoder.
Alta is best for higher-end IP video workflows on-prem or in public cloud, such as 24/7 linear broadcasts or an OTT platform. It can arrive pre-installed on a custom physical rack-mount server with broadcast-style front-panel controls, or as a virtual machine image to be hosted by the customer in a VM environment.
Alta is suitable for broadcast TV in the USA (in CEA-708 Standard), or in DVB regions like the UK, Australia, and the EU (in OP-47/DVB Teletext standard.)
The iCap Cloud Network offers a range of benefits, including:
- Higher bandwidth audio to captioners for increased clarity and word accuracy
- Enhanced security, with all iCap connections encrypted and authenticated
- Seamless transitioning from hardware-driven to software-controlled environments
- Seamless interoperability with AI-Media’s range of captioning solutions
- 24/7/365 connectivity to thousands of certified third-party caption partners worldwide
The CCMatch delay parameter allows our IP caption encoder users to match video and audio with live captions with perfect synchronization to the end viewer. CCMatch also aids in production and clipping by making sure live captions are contained completely within a segment, without overhang from programming into commercial blocks.
Alta doesn’t need to connect to Falcon or any EEG hardware. Alta-TS outputs a stream in either UDP, RTP or SRT protocol, so you will need something downstream that can consume or view this stream. Alta-2110 outputs only 2110-40 ancillary data, which is muxed back into the stream by an external device, also downstream from Alta.
Yes, there is no limit to the number of channels that can be used on one VM, as long as the proper resource specifications are allocated per channel and you have the appropriate iCap credentials and number of licenses.
Yes, other than the VM or AWS deployment, Alta software can arrive pre-installed on a custom physical rackmount server with broadcast style front panel controls. There are 2 options for such hardware:
- An HP ProLiant DL360, which is a high powered rack mount server with dual power supplies and redundant disk drives, and has the ability to be used with HP iLO (advanced iLO features must be licensed separately from HP if desired). 2 x 10 Gbps Ethernet SFP are preinstalled, along with 16 CPU cores (with 2 threads per core) & 32Gb of RAM, however any additional number of processors/RAM can be installed.
- As a more compact, affordable option, the Alta NAP Server is a proprietary bare metal server manufactured by EEG. This single rack unit box contains one power supply and is equipped with an 8-core CPU & 32Gb of RAM (the max that can currently be added). It can support up to four 1Gbps interfaces, but not the 10 Gbps interface.
Yes, Alta will need outbound access to iCap, as well as our cloud licensing server.
Alta 2110 takes in 2110-30 input audio and outputs 2110-40 ancillary data (captions, SCTE104, etc). It does not, however, process 2110-20 video.
Up to 6 languages can be supported on one Alta channel, as long as the language services are configured properly in iCap.
Alta is licensed on a per channel basis, and then depending on the number of channels that you purchase, you can have one license key that gives you access to all these channels on one or multiple servers.
Alta TS and Alta 2110 are both captioning solutions suited for live IP video production environments, however, there are several differences between them.
Alta TS works with compressed MPEG transport streams (single-purpose only), by interleaving an 188 bit wrapper around media packets – each of which can include Program ID’s (PID’s) for audio, video, or metadata (such as captioning) which are defined by the Program Map Table (PMT). These packets are then transported over UDP, RTP, SMPTE 2022 RTP-FEC with multicast or unicast networking, or via SRT (for internet transport) to get from one point to another in the stream, with PCR time stamps used for syncing of the video with the appropriate audio and metadata packets. Supported video formats include MPEG-2, AVC/H264, or HEVC and supported audio codecs include AAC, MPEG-3, and PCM, with ATSC embedded CEA 608/708, SMPTE RDD-11 CEA-708, DVB Teletext, DVB Subtitles/Bitmap accepted as caption output formats. SCTE-35 program insertion cues (for triggering ad breaks) can also be injected directly into the MPEG transport stream (with each SCTE-35 message assigned its own PID).
Alta 2110 (SMPTE) takes in 2110-30 uncompressed audio (up to 64 channels per stream) and optionally incoming upstream 2110-40 ancillary data and outputs a combined feed of 2110-40 ancillary data (either with the upstream captions or new captions added in – with CEA 608/708 or OP-47 as accepted output formats). Alta 2110 requires significantly less bandwidth than Alta TS since there is no processing of video and no interleaving of media streams. Instead, it locks to PTP as a source of timing information (NTP or VITC timecode are also supported) for syncing the streams and uses the NMOS iS-04 and 05 standards for automated stream control. It is also compatible with the S2022-7 standard for dual network redundancy.
VirtualBox, VSphere, Cisco, or Microsoft Controllers.
Alta uses a server-based authentication, connection, and encryption model with all instances safely behind existing firewalls. iCap also keeps a detailed history of logs for all authorized connections so you have full visibility of your system at all times.
Yes, caption data going into the source stream can be transferred to the primary stream.
OVA files for VM’s, AMI’s for AWS EC2’s, or pre-installed on physical HP Proliant or EEG-manufactured NAP servers.
No, Alta currently only supports single-purpose streams.
Alta TS supports MPEG-2, H.264, JPEG200, AVC video (SEI data), and HEVC.
Alta 2110 does not pass through 2110-20 video – only uncompressed 2110-30 audio and 2110-40 anc data.
Supported audio codecs in Alta TS include MPEG-1, MPEG-3, PCM, SMPTE 302M, AC-3, or AAC. Alta 2110 supports SMPTE 2110-30.
RTP/UDP unicast, UDP multicast, or SRT for internet transport. RTMP is not supported in Alta (only in Falcon).
Falcon is used for livestreaming workflows (RTMP).
Alta is used for IP Professional/Broadcast workflows (SMPTE 2110 or MPEG-TS) and can also be deployed in the form of a VM or installed on a physical on-prem server (HP Proliant or the EEG-manufactured NAP).
You can check on the iCap server status here https://status.icap.eegcloud.tv/
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