CLIENT: Popular entertainment news and short-format content provider.

Overview

Consumers’ insatiable and growing demand for streaming media on ever-greater numbers of OTT platforms offers fantastic opportunities, as well as daunting challenges, for content providers. The goal is to deliver high-value content tailored to the specific requirements of each platform, including multi-language transcriptions and compliant closed captions, and to do it as fast and efficiently as possible. Speed and efficiency are especially important in a news and entertainment environment, where every second counts in delivering breaking stories.

As one of the premier entertainment news sites with a focus on Hollywood, this Digital Nirvana client recently signed on as a short-form content provider for Quibi.

Business Challenge

This client was facing two key challenges in order to meet its contractual obligations to Quibi. First, the client’s submitted content has to include closed captions in line with the video platform’s standards and style guidelines. Second, the client agreed to a very tight delivery turnaround – no more than 90 minutes from the time of acquisition to the time the content would be published to Quibi.

With time of the essence, the client went in search of a solution that could speed production and produce accurate and properly formatted captions as quickly as possible.

The client ruled out traditional broadcast captioning providers, who –while offering highly accurate and quality results – could not meet the extreme turnaround time for live streaming. App-based internet captioning tools guarantee fast results, but they are essentially single-format tools that do not offer the flexibility and customization capabilities the client needed for output to Quibi.

Solution

To overcome these challenges, the content provider chose Trance – Digital Nirvana’s AI-based, enterprise-grade, cloud-based platform for transcription, closed captioning, and translation. With automatic transcription and caption generation, Trance has accelerated the client’s content publishing workflows by orders of magnitude and delivered tremendous time savings in the captioning process.

The client leverages three key Trance capabilities in order to meet and even exceed its requirements for fast and seamless content delivery to Quibi. These include:

1. Speech-to-Text (STT) TranscriptionTrance’s STT engine applies advanced AI-based algorithms to generate automatically a highly accurate transcription for raw production footage. This allowed post-production to quickly sort and find the most relevant content. Since Trance can be configured to generate transcripts in up to 25 languages, the client has been able to meet Quibi’s request to deliver transcripts and captions in both English and Spanish.
2. Automated Caption GenerationBased on the transcript, Trance automatically outputs closed captions based on the Quibi style guide and enables users to confirm compliance with output requirements.
3. Enterprise Feature SetThe enterprise-level capabilities of Trance give the client unprecedented control and flexibility to create captioning workflows that deliver maximum efficiencies. In one example,Trance offers the ability to define presets according to the style guide of the destination platform – in this case, Quibi. The Trance STT engine applies the preset throughout the entire workflow from transcription generation to final caption output, ensuring compliant captions that meet Quibi’s exacting requirements.

Differentiators

Trance offered a unique solution to this entertainment news provider’s requirements. Unlike other captioning solutions,

• Enterprise flexibility, with administrative features to support the most demanding requirements of a large-scale content provider to multiple OTT platforms.
• Creative flexibility, including the ability to adapt caption output based on the specific requirements of the destination platform.
• The Digital Nirvana culture of excellence and innovation, offering solutions designed specifically for the high-intensity, high-volume, and fast-turnaround environments of today’s news and entertainment content operations.