ENCO will make its debut at ISE 2023 in the Discovery Zone (stand CS544) alongside other upcoming AV innovators. The company will reinforce its commitment to the Pro AV market, demonstrating its fifth-generation, AI-enhanced enCaption automated captioning and transcription solution for AV applications. The company will also demonstrate its ClipFire live and automated content-delivery platform for sports, concerts and other events, and formally introduce the RUSHWORKS family of production, playback, streaming and robotics solutions under the ENCO brand. ENCO announced its acquisition of RUSHWORKS on Jan. 3.
“ENCO has been a trusted brand used worldwide by radio and TV broadcasters for more than three decades and has invested in sales resources, growing a global partner network and company infrastructure to enable global AV growth,” said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO. “ISE offers an opportunity to introduce our proven captioning and playout solutions to a global AV audience and reinforce our commitment to an industry that reveals intriguing new layers and opportunities each year.”
[ACQUISITION NEWS: ENCO Acquires RUSHWORKS]
Live Open Captioning and Translation
ENCO’s enCaption live captioning software is a platform for automated closed-captioning in broadcast TV and radio for several years and holds patents that have strengthened ENCO’s intellectual property for captioning technology and speech-to-text translation. enCaption makes it fast, easy, and cost-effective for AV professionals, content producers, and broadcasters to create transcripts and add closed or open captions to both live and pre-recorded AV content in 45 languages, combining machine learning with advanced speech-to-text conversion and grammatical structure analysis to deliver exceptional accuracy with extremely low latency.
Over the last two years, ENCO has invested engineering resources into developing an open captioning platform that uses the same proven technology to automate open captioning with speed and accuracy for live meetings, presentations, classes/lectures and events, with a rapidly growing AV customer base in the Americas. The latest release, enCaption5, is a cloud-native, microservices-based solution that takes full advantage of public cloud infrastructure, eliminating the need for on-premises capital equipment when captioning or transcribing file-based content.
enCaption5 can also be deployed on-premises or in hybrid on-prem/cloud workflows for customers who need traditional AV signal connectivity for live captioning and transcription or who prefer an on-premises solution. Flexible pricing options for cloud-based enCaption5 deployments make the platform even more cost-effective for customers such as houses of worship, municipalities, and live event producers with only periodic or ad hoc captioning and transcription needs.
[Everything You Need for ISE 2023: The AV Network ISE 2023 News Hub]
“Captioning, subtitling, and transcription have become crucial elements of live streams, stage presentations, meetings, sports, and other events,” said Frommert. “enCaption5 makes live and pre-recorded content more inclusively accessible for hard-of-hearing participants, non-native-language speakers, and the massive audience of viewers who consume content on their personal devices with the sound muted.”
The new enTranslate plug-in (available Spring 2023) adds live translation for 27 languages, allowing enCaption5 users to easily make AV content such as corporate meetings, government sessions, lectures, sermons, and training materials understandable to non-native-speaking viewers. Translated captions can be embedded into VOD content for subsequent viewing or shown as open-captioned subtitles on local displays to assist in-person attendees during live events. enTranslate includes unit conversion—such as metric to imperial measurements—with conversions automatically performed based on source and target languages.
enCaption5’s caption editor allows users to view and refine the results of offline or previous real-time transcriptions. Uploaded video files or recordings made during live captioning can be played back while displaying the automatically generated captions, with the current word highlighted as the video plays. Users can hover over words to see their confidence scores and edit them as needed—particularly useful for unique spellings such as uncommon names—and changes are fed back to enCaption5’s intelligent word models to improve future accuracy. Finally, the software’s open API enables seamless integration with media asset management systems for indexing and searching, while also allowing third-party developers to leverage the advantages of ENCO’s proven, purpose-built captioning technology within their own solutions including comprehensive AV systems and conversational AI applications.
Rapid Content Automation for Live Events
ENCO’s live and automated playout experience in broadcast and production environments are at the core of ClipFire, which helps users rapidly deliver content in live event venues, enhancing the fan experience for live sports, concerts and more.
ClipFire combines automatic ingest, media asset management, graphics, and playout automation together into one unified platform. It supports the ingest and playout of an assortment of industry-standard file formats, resolutions, and frame rates and transcodes them on-the-fly to the desired output format. The software supports a range of live inputs from SD/HD/3G-SDI sources, USB cameras, and network sources using the NDI protocol.
[Captioning: What Venues Need to Know]
ENCO recently added a native Clip Editor that allows users to adjust in/out points and merge clips within the ClipFire application. Also new is a resizable L-bar that automates live video squeeze backs to accommodate wraparound graphics for a sophisticated look in live playout environments. Users can automate dynamic graphic overlays to accentuate real-time information display. Integrating seamlessly with a growing range of third-party systems, ClipFire offers frictionless, end-to-end media workflows.
“We call ClipFire a ‘Channel in a Box.’ It’s designed for digital signage and playout of multiple different video channels while ingesting video at the same time,” said Bill Bennett, media solutions and account manager at ENCO. “It can be automated with real-time data and automation systems, live assist with human beings, or be completely live operated, so it’s very flexible.”
All ENCO products are backed by the company’s round-the-clock US-Based support team—from remote assistance to on-site installation to troubleshooting—plus a comprehensive online support portal and knowledge base.
