ENCO has announced that its enCaption4 automated captioning solution has joined the global NDI community to provide turnkey closed or open captions on live video, at a time when the broadcast and professional A/V industries are migrating to an IP-based infrastructure.

At the upcoming 2018 NAB Show, ENCO will demonstrate enCaption4 with this new NDI capability alongside the software-defined solution’s breakthrough accuracy, accelerated speed, extremely low latency, and expanded foreign language support.

With its powerful, real-time speech-to-text engine, enCaption4 is an on-premise or cloud-based solution for generating the accurate live captioning that live TV and online video require. For the first time, broadcasters, content producers and commercial AV facilities with an NDI infrastructure can add an automated captioning solution into their workflows. Once connected, enCaption4 can automatically generate captions through its NDI input stream, and output an NDI signal with captions keyed directly on top of the video stream. This capability simplifies the captioning workflow by eliminating the need for specialized encoding hardware.

“With the growing popularity of NDI, we added NDI support based on customer demand,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “With NDI support, we’re making it easier for TV networks, local stations and non-traditional broadcasters such as corporations, schools and universities, houses of worship, and webcasters to use our automated captioning solutions within their real-time NDI productions.”

As an automated, turnkey on-premise or cloud-based solution, enCaption products are especially well-suited to IP-based NDI video production and streaming environments. The breakthrough interoperability offers a strong and reliable solution for accurate closed captioning within live web and social media streams, such as Facebook Live.

“While online video distribution is not subject to the same stringent closed captioning regulations as broadcast TV, the use of captions ensures a larger audience for any online video,” Frommert said. “Advocacy groups for the hard of hearing are also actively pushing for online video programs to contain captions. And many watching video on portable devices in public places prefer to keep their volume down and turn on captions instead.”

According to Michael Kornet, Executive Vice President of Business Development for NewTek: "Software-driven IP workflows are quickly becoming ubiquitous in video production. NDI-enabled devices, like the ENCO enCaption4 automated closed captioning system, exponentially increase the video capabilities available within today’s cost-effective, NDI production and streaming environments.”