In Broadcast - March 2013 - 78

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 17 - MARCH 2013

N E W S

InMEDIA

Getting Your Story Across With NewTek
U

78

ntil recently, most people who
created TV shows and movies
to tell their stories were famous, or
had a big pile of money to invest in
a production.
Then, along came NewTek with
its vision to democratise television
production and revolutionise the
way people communicate their
messages. They believe that anyone
with an idea, some determination
and a few NewTek tools can bring
their creative visions to life – and
not just as a ‘shaky-cam’ home
movie, but full-on, HD broadcast
television, with visual effects and
motion graphics, and delivered
live to the web for consumption
on TV, computer, phone – anything
that’s connected.
NewTek’s TriCaster line is
designed to meet the demands of the
entire spectrum of video producers,
including those who want to deliver
live events to a global audience.
From bloggers, schools and small
businesses, to broadcast networks,
large media publishers, and major
event producers – anyone using
TriCaster can decrease their total
cost of ownership while increasing
the quality of their productions.
The newest model, TriCaster 40,

allows small-market TV stations,
schools, small businesses, and
production start-ups to create
professional, real-time programmes
and stream them to the Web, while
TriCaster 8000 is designed to
deliver live video for large, complex
events with full integration of social
media production tools. Ultimately,
there is a TriCaster solution suited
for productions and budgets
of every size.
NewTek customers include
Arsenal TV, which has built an
HD facility with a TriCaster to
sit at the centre of everything as
its main production switcher. The
team creates weekly magazine
TV programmes for around 20
worldwide broadcasters, as well
as three hours of content around
each ﬁrst team match, and a weekly
talk show. All content is available
via a dedicated website, enabling

Baby brother: NewTek’s TriCaster 40
can stream productions to the Web

NewTek’s TriCaster
8000 is designed
to deliver live video
for large, complex
events

the club to communicate
with its fans both at home and
around the world.
Another NewTek customer,
StreamUK, is also well versed in
sending stories around the world.
The portability of the TriCaster
has proved invaluable for projects
such as the Red Bull Bedroom
Jam – an online competition that
saw young bands performing live
in their bedrooms from different UK
locations each week. As Production
Manager Mike Grimley says, “It’s
like taking an entire studio in a
box to any production. We can

throw different types of camera or
audio formats at it, and it can cope
with anything.”
In addition corporate clients are
using NewTek solutions to broadcast
internal messaging internationally –
a much more cost effective and ecofriendly method of communication
than ﬂying large numbers of people
around the world – while others are
reaching their customers through
in-store televisions.
For anyone with a story to
tell, NewTek has the tools to
broadcast it.

A Solution For Screen Web Subtitle Consistency
roadcasters today have to face
up to the challenge of providing
captions on their web-video content
equivalent to the broadcast versions.
This means implementing
workflows that can provide
the required caption files in an
appropriate timed-text format,
adjusted to suit the revised ad
patterns – even for content that is
live captioned.
For some broadcasters there is the
added challenge of the inconsistency
of presentation across players and
devices that can also adversely
affect the viewer experience.
The workﬂow challenge can be
summarised as:
• Providing caption ﬁles for all new
content (rather than just video with
Line 21 embedded closed caption
data);
• Recovering closed caption
information from the VBI of
archive material;
• Adjusting files for revised ad
patterns;
• Capturing and re-versioning realtime caption data;
• Ensuring real-time captions are
displayed in the player;
• Overcoming inconsistencies
between players and devices.

B

Screen has now developed
solutions for each of these
s t e p s , i n c l u d i n g re a l - t i m e
captions on the web.
Most web-video players use a
simple timed-text ﬁle for captioning
or subtitling but the appearance of
the captions can differ between
players and devices.
These inconsistencies may
not seriously affect a minimal
implementation that’s sufﬁcient to
satisfy a regulator concerned with
accessibility (given the inherent
limitations of traditional closed
captioning), but it’s still a long way off

Screen’s web subtitling solution

reproducing the intended TV viewing
experience of open-captions used
for translation subtitles for instance.
Screen has therefore developed
a method to encode, store and
display high-quality subtitles with
served web video playback. The
solution ensures that subtitles
are always displayed in the style
intended regardless of the player –
while allowing the viewer to select
from several language streams or
switch them off without the need
to re-encode the video or host
multiple copies.
Using an image based approach

Screen’s new solution ensures
a consistent presentation of the
subtitles on all web video players
with improved visual quality
of the subtitles and minimal
player development.
Transferring the real-time captions
on live and near-live broadcast TV
programmes to live web streams
is not so easy.
There is no timed-text delivery path
for live streams and unlike served
video the player does not provide
an elapsed time indication so the
variable latencies in web delivery
make accurate synchronisation
very difﬁcult – and that’s before
allowing the viewer the chance to
pause and resume the playback, or
even rewind it.
The image based approach
from Screen can also be applied
to live web-streaming with minor
modiﬁcations to allow for a real-time
workﬂow (rather than ﬁle-based) and
to ensure subtitles synchronise to
video regardless of buffering etc.
Visitors to NAB interested in
learning more about Screen’s web
subtitling solution can speak to their
specialists who will be present on
stand during the exhibition.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.newtek.com/products/tricaster-8000.html http://www.screensystems.tv
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