Pennsylvania-based television station PBS39 has recently implemented automatic real-time captioning (ARC) from Red Bee Media. 

Red Bee-1

Red Bee: Red Bee’s Subito is used for planned and emergency live content

The AI-driven solution combines automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with Red Bee’s Subito live captioning platform. It allows the broadcaster to activate automatic captions for planned and emergency live content at the press of a button.

“Our team loves having the freedom to be able to activate closed captioning easily for our live broadcasts whenever we need it,” said Andrea Cummis, chief technology officer, PBS39. “With a growing vocabulary that is adapted to our preferences and needs, the ARC solution delivers near perfect accuracy and thanks to Red Bee we now have an easy and cost-effective way of making our content more accessible to our audiences. We’re very satisfied.”

PBS39 was looking for an alternative solution after regularly having to source captioning services for unplanned live content at short notice, which tended to be time-consuming and expensive. Red Bee set up the ARC system with the television station’s caption presentation preferences, core vocabulary lists and an integrated activation interface. After concluding a successful three-month trial, PBS39 signed up for a multi-year contract to use Red Bee’s ARC solution for its live captioning requirements.

“We have created a market-leading automatic captioning system that uses our experience as a major global access services provider to meet all accessibility requirements for broadcasters, delivering greater accuracy than any competing systems on the market and at a much lower cost than traditional human live captioning,” said Juliet Gauthier, strategic product manager, access services, Red Bee Media. “We’re happy that PBS39 are satisfied with the result, and we are looking forward to continuing making their content more accessible.”

PBS39 is using Red Bee’s ARC solution for two purposes. First for planned live content, which brings the highest possible accuracy secured through vocabulary optimisation delivered by Red Bee’s expert captioning team ahead of the broadcast. They also use the solution for short notice ‘emergency’ live content, where content-specific vocabulary is not optimised before the show, but the system retains PBS39’s core vocabulary lists including the names of news anchors, local places and people, and important general vocabulary relating to recent news events.