With headquarters in Hollywood and a presence around the globe, this media services company performs end-to-end processing and packaging of media assets that get published on multiple platforms, including OTT and broadcast.

Overview

These assets are owned by some of the world’s largest media and broadcast companies – companies that mandate the highest quality. For all major platforms and media organizations that deal with publishing content, viewer experience is the key to success, so this Digital Nirvana customer puts a lot of effort into ensuring its clients receive high-quality output well within the time to market.

Business Challenge

Closed captions are just one of this media services provider’s many deliverables. To keep up with captioning large volumes of media, the customer had been dealing with multiple caption-generation vendors across the globe. This practice posed administrative challenges because it required multiple personnel to assign jobs to vendors based on capacity and to monitor incoming caption files for on-time arrival. In addition, the customer also had to run a full quality-check operation to make sure captions met its clients’ stringent standards. That’s because, in addition to expectations for the quality of text, each end customer and platform has a specific style guide that closed captions must adhere to. Meeting those standards is critical since quality issues in closed captions could hurt viewer experience, and non-compliance with customer-defined style guides will result in resubmissions, leading to delayed time to market.

Solution

After extensive evaluation, this media-processing powerhouse chose Digital Nirvana’s in-house experts to provide turnkey closed captioning and conformance services for all of its content, eliminating the need to work with multiple vendors. Digital Nirvana’s team includes dedicated language and content specialists covering more than 30 languages. This team, aided by cloud-based technology, generates highly accurate transcripts, captions, and text translations within the shortest turnaround times. Over a three-month evaluation period, the customer found that Digital Nirvana’s work resulted in zero resubmissions.

How It Works

In this implementation, the customer has its own unique portal through which it transfers the media files it wants captioned. Once the files are assigned, Digital Nirvana’s team gets an email notification from the portal and adds the files to Digital Nirvana’s workflow. The workflow automatically classifies each media file according to language, expected output, customer style guides, etc. Based on the classification, the workflow will send the file for speech-to-text generation if a script is not available. From there, the media file and its automatic, speech-to-text output appear in a UI, where one of Digital Nirvana’s professional transcriptionists performs final text edits to create a perfect transcript. Once the transcript generation process is complete, the workflow applies AI-based algorithms to split the transcript into captions based on the customer’s style-guide requirements.

Once done, the media and split captions are presented to a Digital Nirvana captioner in a professional captioning interface, where the captioner makes final reviews and corrections to ensure the best user experience within the framework of the style guide. After the captioner’s review, Digital Nirvana’s workflow performs automatic QC to ensure all technical parameters are met, and then a final output is generated by the system based on the customer’s requirements. This final output gets uploaded back to the customer portal in the form of a sidecar file.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a critical part of Digital Nirvana’s captioning service. Multiple quality checks — including two levels of human curation — mean this customer can eliminate its own costly and time-consuming quality-assurance operation. Instead, the speech-to-text output gets reviewed by one of Digital Nirvana’s human transcribers to ensure high accuracy. If a transcriber is ever unsure of any words, they have the option to flag another senior user to ensure the words are correct. The AI-based system then splits the transcript into captions, and while at it, checks for placement of proper nouns, punctuation, and other grammatical elements, flagging questions to the captioner if need be. The captioner reviews the content frame by frame to ensure the best user experience as well as adherence to style guides. Once done, Digital Nirvana’s system performs automatic QC to ensure that the humans did not miss any technical parameters. All these checks happen prior to delivery.

Digital Nirvana also follows a post-delivery audit system, whereby the auditing team evaluates a percentage of all files delivered to the customer and generates feedback based on various parameters. This helps Digital Nirvana to constantly keep track of the quality of outgoing deliverables.

Differentiators

Consistent quality:

Digital Nirvana understands the importance of consistent quality output and therefore has put processes in place to ensure all boxes are ticked before the final output reaches the customer.

Reliability:

The cloud-based workflow and a well-defined business continuity process ensure operations at Digital Nirvana run 24/7 without interruption. This is one of the key factors this customer was considering since such service stoppage could lead to delays in an asset’s time to market. The global presence, coupled with technological innovations, helps Digital Nirvana to meet uninterrupted service deliveries.

Ability to ramp up:

Many customers often have spikes in the inflow of volumes, but they don’t want to have to find new vendors for a short period of time to accommodate the influx. That’s why Digital Nirvana has perfected its ability to ramp up with short notice and deliver additional volumes within the required turnaround without a decrease in quality. Digital Nirvana brings two decades of experience in handling seasonal volumes, and the entire operation is set up to handle peaks and valleys in terms of the amount of data to be delivered.

Results

Since deployment began in August 2021, Digital Nirvana’s technology-aided workflow and highly experienced captioners have been successfully delivering captions according to customer requirements and within the required turnaround time of 24 to 48 hours. In fact, thanks to 24/7 operations and a strong customer support team, Digital Nirvana has been able to exceed customer expectations in terms of output quality, delivery time, and the ability to accommodate rush orders and change requests.

Digital Nirvana’s well-defined processes and operations, coupled with its ability to ramp up and consistently deliver high-quality output well within time constraints, have enabled the customer to redeploy personnel to other core functions instead of spending valuable time on vendor management, project monitoring, and QC.

Since the start of service, this customer has added a host of marquee clients to its list thanks to Digital Nirvana’s focus on accuracy, quality, and timeliness.