ENCO formally debuted its first closed caption encoder at NAB New York, advancing ENCO’s leadership position as the broadcast industry’s first company to build a native solution across the entire closed captioning workflow. The homegrown DoCaption EN848 is now shipping and available separately or as part of ENCO’s award-winning enCaption system, giving customers an immediate on-prem or cloud option for fast, automated conversion and delivery of captions and translations.
The EN848’s availability provides broadcasters with the opportunity to deploy the system over the IP network, with connectivity to enCaption for cloud-based captioning services such as those offered by ENCO’s partner VITAC. The EN848’s dual connectivity options also allow broadcasters to deploy redundant captioning workflows with immediate failover from cloud to on-prem should the network temporarily go dark. ENCO will demonstrate the core functions and deployment options for the EN848 on Wednesday and Thursday at the Javits Center, where ENCO exhibits at Booth 907.
The EN848’s core function is to reliably insert closed captions coming from any source downstream in compliance with global captioning standards. Long the industry’s leading voice for captioning software, the EN848 now positions ENCO directly upstream to bring the industry a truly native solution. ENCO has therefore paired the exceptional speed and accuracy of enCaption’s automated conversions with a reliable 1RU solution that keeps broadcasters in compliance as captions go live to air. The EN848 conforms to a broad range of closed captioning specifications, including the encoding and insertion of CEA-608/CEA-708, and Teletext/OP47 ancillary data for standardised and legacy communication protocols.
The EN848 is a direct result of ENCO’s 2023 acquisition of DoCaption, a genuinely strategic move that brought DoCaption’s engineering talent and proven ancillary data technology in-house. The now singular ENCO engineering team developed the EN848 in collaboration, emerging with a software-defined, FPGA-based ultra-low latency SDI captions encoder and inserter that can be powered by human or advanced speech recognition (ASR) sources both on-prem and in the cloud. For on-prem workflows, the EN848 offers a specially engineered server to process ASR sources from enCaption systems.
“While compliance and reliability remain the core function of the closed caption encoder, the EN848 was developed with bigger aspirations in mind. The EN848 was purpose-built to natively pair with enCaption, removing the need for a third-party device and offering broadcasters a single source of support,” said Ken Frommert, President, ENCO. “We have updated DoCaption’s proven technology and packaged it into a turnkey 1RU solution that broadcasters can deploy in flexible ways that optimise redundancy and quality, and provide direct access to cloud services from companies such as VITAC.”
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