At NAB 2018, Telestream will introduce a unique ‘one-box-solution’ for closed caption encoding to multiple live streams. Sophisticated 608/708 caption insertion capability is part of the latest version of Lightspeed Live Stream, Telestream’s multiscreen live encoding and packaging at scale solution for broadcasters, content aggregators and live event production companies.
The broadest range of organizations need live captioning. As live video streaming over IP networks continues to grow exponentially, the need for live closed captions within multiscreen applications is becoming critical. In response, Telestream’s new integrated live caption encoding solution is now part of Lightspeed Live Stream, helping avoid the cost and complexity of going to baseband when inserting digital captions.
Today, virtually all IP caption insertion systems are cloud-based, requiring content to be moved first to the cloud, there captioned, then re-encoded and re-streamed for delivery. This introduces significant opportunity for human and mechanical error, ultimately impacting the quality of the final content. In contrast, Telestream’s live captioning solution with Lightspeed Live Stream eliminates restreaming, instead encoding the live captions within the original stream and ensuring the best possible quality.
And unlike expensive traditional one-channel baseband caption hardware, Telestream has used its industry-leading experience to develop a single 1RU enclosure that encodes captions to multiple live video streams, saving space and as much as $7K to $10K per channel. The system’s scalability offers on-demand caption insertion over as many streams as needed. Lightspeed Live Stream uses standard captioning protocols to receive caption data, so existing third-party court reporting software can connect to Lightspeed Live Stream via IP, making the system truly ‘plug and play’.
“Whether its commercial broadcaster streaming or live captions for Facebook, YouTube or any other streaming platform, we have developed functionality in Lightspeed Live Stream that absolutely simplifies live stream captioning,” said Scott Murray, VP Product Management at Telestream. “Uniquely, our solution involves no re-encoding or re-streaming so there is zero possibility of blips and glitches being introduced into the streamed content.”
In addition to the new live captioning capabilities, users benefit from a true enterprise-class live streaming, encoding and packaging system. For multiscreen live encoding and packaging at scale, Lightspeed Live Stream is Telestream’s premiere live encoder for broadcasters and content aggregators. With this advanced solution, users can add time delay to the stream for synchronization purposes. In addition, they can use Lightspeed Live Stream to route captured recordings to Telestream’s Vantage Media Processing Platform for further enhancement.
