Ericsson has announced the launch of a closed captioning service in the US, to meet the growing demand for live subtitling for broadcasters and operators. The service will meet the new regulations outlined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which intend to increase the quality of captioning services, and to provide smoother and more accurate closed-captioned communications across a wider-reach of programming.
“We believe that we can create significant value for US broadcasters and platform operators,” explained Thorsten Sauer, Ericsson’s head of broadcast and media services. “By ensuring their content is accessible to audiences everywhere and harnessing valuable metadata, we can power more effective content discovery and open new revenue models in a world with more platforms and more content than ever before.
“We are one of the largest media service providers in the world, originating more than 500 mostly complex channels, managing more than eight million metadata assets and providing leading creative services. I am excited to extend our portfolio to the U.S. market, starting with closed captioning that has a received a lot of encouraging customer feedback.”
The company will establish a broadcast and media services hub based in Atlanta, Georgia to provide closed captioning and video description services to both domestic and international clients as of April 2015.
Ericsson is the largest provider of closed captioning in Europe, delivering more than 200,000 hours of captions per year to major broadcasters and operators including the BBC and Sky.
