Client: A major international entertainment company and the most extensive media enterprise in the Spanish-speaking world
Overview
The explosion in OTT platforms has created new opportunities for traditional media companies to reach larger audiences worldwide. As a worldwide distributor of Spanish-language content, this organization is no exception – and the company now offers its programming on virtually every major OTT outlet.
Business Challenges
With a massive archive of premium, high-demand content natively produced in Spanish, the company needed a faster and more efficient means of generating subtitles for archived content and then creating time-code-accurate sidecar files in English and other languages. Producers also required the ability to create captions automatically for new, original content. An essential requirement was the ability to output translated subtitles needed to conform to the global OTT platforms’ individual style guides on which the content would be distributed.
Previously, the media enterprise relied on a completely manual process by which bilingual personnel would listen to the content and create captions line by line. The company also needed a more efficient method for generating high-confidence Spanish transcriptions from the audio used as a base for creating translated captions.
Solutions
The media operation has drastically improved these workflows with Trance, Digital Nirvana’s AI-based, enterprise-grade, cloud-based platform for transcription, closed captioning, and translation. Trance has saved the technical team many hours occupied by manual translation tasks through automated, multilanguage caption generation. For example, Trance can generate closed captions for a typical one-hour program in under two hours – a process that could take a highly skilled translator up to 15 hours working manually.
In addition to generating Spanish closed captions automatically from the original audio, Trance then creates an English caption file. Users can see the Spanish and English captions in a single interface, each in a separate window, as they appear with the video. This makes it easy for operators to validate the captions’ quality and ensure that the English version captures the appropriate context. Trance uniquely preserves the frame-by-frame time codes from the original caption file, making the process of generating and delivering captions in additional languages even faster and more accurate.
For newly produced content, Trance’s STT engine applies advanced AI-based algorithms to generate a highly accurate transcription automatically. Since Trance can be configured to create transcripts in up to 25 languages, the company can meet OTT platforms’ requirements to deliver transcripts and captions in English and Spanish.
Differentiators
This robust media enterprise chose Digital Nirvana’s Trance over competing for captioning solutions based on the following unique capabilities: Ability to generate translations almost instantly using existing closed-caption files and then export new, publish-ready sidecar files for OTT platforms.
1. A rapid turnaround time that is virtually unheard of in the captioning industry, with the ability to reduce the captioning time for a specific program from 15 hours to less than two.
2. Features for maximum captioning efficiency and ease of use, such as preserving original time codes and applying them to new caption files, and the ability to view caption streams for multiple languages in a single interface.
