Dual output live captioning

Carla was sitting in London today, chatting online to our realtime captioner, Jeanette, in Kansas. Jeanette was about to dual output live captioning for a religious service to a television station in Arkansas and asked if Tina wanted to watch. You bet!

What is remote dual output live captioning?

Remote captions means the captioner is listening to a speaker in a different location and producing web-accessible captions. We use the internet and VOIP (typically Skype) to do this.

Jeanette called the Arkansas TV station over VOIP so she could hear their audio. Her computer equipment and CAT software connects to a modem or network through the internet and captions are embedded in the television’s signal which captions are then visible to the viewer watching a TV with a decoder built into the TV set. In the UK this is known as subtitles. In the US this is known as closed captions.

Today, Jeanette was using a dual output setup for live captioning. This means the captions can be streamed to different devices at the same time.

Jeanette was sending a signal to the Arkansas station from Kansas to send three lines of text to TV. The captions were also accessible for those watching TV via the internet; PLUS, this same live broadcast could be viewed as a live text stream by anyone in the world with an internet-connected device!

The idea of dual output allows a TV station to offer added value by streaming captions to those in emergency situations. For example, in the event of an emergency and the electricity goes off making live TV impossible, families can turn on their handheld devices and can still see internet TV and get the emergency closed captions.  Isn’t that awesome?

Even more awesome, Carla is in London, watching live TV captions from an Arkansas TV station, originating from a captioner in Kansas. Doesn’t that just blow your mind!

Contact us if you would like to find out more about making your services accessible through remote dual output live captioning, email us at bookings@121captions.com