ENCO is growing its footprint in captioning and translation with the acquisition of two product lines from Vox Frontera called TranslateTV (TTV) and Sentinel.
“The TTV acquisition provides ENCO with a broader reach into the growing multi-generational Hispanic television market inside the U.S. and abroad by offering broadcasters an on-premises option for advanced translation of live Spanish-language TV captioning, with plans to develop a global solution specific to AV applications,” ENCO said in the announcement.
“Sentinel supports cost-effective, real-time quality monitoring solution for automated captions — an especially valuable solution to keep broadcasters compliant with FCC closed-captioning standards related to accuracy, synchronization and completeness.”
Vox Frontera, based in Silver Spring, Md., is headed by CEO Greg Schmidt. The firm said it “has made a strategic decision to focus our company resources on other development efforts.” Director of Engineering Dave Pinson will join ENCO.
Users of TTV include “The Tonight Show” and local TV stations. It translates English closed captions into Spanish in real time.
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ENCO noted that it already offers Spanish and other language translation in its automated enTranslate service, but the latter only supports cloud-based processing. TTV, it said, is an on-premises system, which some customers will prefer.
ENCO also said it plans to use this technology to develop an on-premises Spanish-language translation and captioning offering “for financial institutions, corporations, government bodies and universities that restrict access to sensitive information.”
It quoted President Ken Frommert saying it plans to integrate TTV with its enCaption automated captioning. “We will enable this technology to natively accept live and prerecorded audio feeds and automatically convert them to text. Our same workflow will inject these translations onto multiple consumer platforms, presenting live, accurate captions on TV sets, desktop, laptops and mobile devices.”
