Australian news channel selects Ericsson for captioning services

NEW DELHI :Swedish telecom giant Ericsson has said  that it has signed a multi-year news captioning contract with ANC, Australia's leading 24-hour multi-channel, multi-platform news service provider.

Ericsson will provide live captioning services for SKY NEWS LIVE and SKY NEWS BUSINESS, which are broadcast to 2.8 million subscribing homes across Australia on subscription television provider Foxtel.

As part of the contract, Ericsson will also provide captioning services for SKY NEWS-produced bulletins on Qantas flights. The captions will be delivered as an as-live service to ensure the news is as current and up-to-date as possible.

Ericsson now provides captioning services for four of the six national TV news outlets in Australia.

"We look forward to working with Ericsson to expand our captioning services and explore new technology to further improve the quality and availability of live captioning," said Angelos Frangopoulos, CEO, ANC.

"For the first time, Ericsson's captions will also be made available on an airline, ensuring that the latest news from SKY NEWS will be accessible to as many Qantas air passengers as possible the world over," said Thorsten Sauer, Head of Broadcast and Media Services, Ericsson.

Ericsson's live captioning platform made its debut at the IBC2014 event. The real-time platform supports live captioning in various languages for broadcasters around the world by using speech-to-text, newsroom integration and rapid offline content preparation.

The enterprise-level, schedule-driven software platform, which was developed in-house, uses the best possible speech recognition and stenography technologies to power Ericsson's live captioning services. It allows multiple captioners to prepare and deliver real-time services for clients while maximizing re-use of the caption data after it has been broadcast - for example, by helping to power content discovery and enrich archive search. The platform is currently being used to deliver live captioning services for major broadcast clients around the world.