Solution eliminates the need for additional live captioning hardware, delivering high-accuracy and low-latency captions to streaming platforms

3Play Media, the leading video accessibility provider, announced today the availability of its live virtual caption encoding solution. The solution, which streamlines the live captioning workflow from listening through delivery, reduces the friction that exists for organizations and ensures an engaging audience experience.

“Captioning of live video is causing significant challenges for corporations, higher education institutions, and over-the-top (OTT) platforms that broadcast live events. There simply are not enough resources to watch carefully over every detail of a live event, especially once it has started, and there’s more need than ever to ensure accessibility is seamless. Virtual and hybrid events have proven to be pandemic-proof - in fact, according to Forrester, more than 80 percent of event leaders plan to conduct the same number or more virtual events over the next 12 months as they did last year,” Josh Miller, co-CEO and co-founder, 3Play Media said. “Our virtual caption encoding solution takes a modern approach to live captioning, simplifying captioning workflows to deliver highly accurate and low-latency captions to our customers, ensuring a seamless experience.”

With the live virtual encoding solution, 3Play Media customers send a real-time messaging protocol (RTMP) stream to 3Play Media’s platform, where 3Play Media generates automated or professionally created captions based on the request of the customer. That stream with encoded captions is then delivered to any platform supporting RTMP streams and the decoding of CEA-608 captions, the standard captioning protocol for analog television.

The benefits of 3Play Media’s live virtual caption encoding solution include:

• Intuitive event scheduling interface. Many solutions still require customers to call and schedule their events manually.
• Low latency captions. Captions will appear at about a 2-second delay versus the broadcast standard of 4-6 seconds after the visual content, ensuring an audience using captions can stay in real-time with the content.
• Live Auto Caption failover. In the unfortunate and rare case a human captioner loses their connection, our patent-pending solution will automatically failover to ASR captions.
• Send captions anywhere. Captions can be sent to any streaming platforms that support RTMP-based streaming protocols and decoding of CEA-608 captions.
• Post-event that guarantees 99 percent accuracy. After the event, the raw transcript of the entire event can be downloaded and upgraded to guarantee almost 100 percent accuracy.

Live virtual caption encoding is a new product offering made possible by 3Play Media’s acquisition of Captionmax last year, with more live innovation to come throughout the year.

About 3Play Media

3Play Media is an integrated video accessibility platform with patented solutions for closed captioning, transcription, live captioning, audio description, and subtitling. 3Play Media combines machine learning (ML) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) with human review to provide innovative, highly accurate services. Customers span multiple industries, including media & entertainment, corporate, e-commerce, fitness, higher education, government, and e-learning. In 2022, 3Play Media acquired Captionmax and NCC, extending their support for broadcast, post-production, and Canadian markets.

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