Screen Announce 4K Subtitling At IBC

Screen’s Polistream product further justified its position in the industry as the market-leading subtitle transmission product when the new generation BLACK system launched, meeting demanding environmental standards. This year, Screen are demonstrating the BLACK system’s power and flexibility with its extended features.
4K Subtitling
With the advent of HD, much of the industry understood the need to reduce the danger of the viewing experience being diminished by poor subtitles and so turned to Screen’s Polistream Black transmission system - a proven solution for transmitting high-definition subtitles.
This is a trend which has continued throughout the HD rollout and with the introduction of 4K, Screen has harnessed the scalability of its PolistreamBLACK system to transmit quality 4K subtitles in readiness.
Screen’s Sales and Marketing director, Gary Glover said: "We were aware during the HD rollout that some broadcasters were focussed heavily on the quality of the pictures and yet had considered less the issue of destroying the content with poor subtitles; with the astonishing quality of 4K it seems to be more of a distraction.
"We strongly feel that if you’re going to offer your viewers the extraordinary experience of watching 4K content, then why devalue that experience for the hard-of-hearing or foreign language speakers with subtitles that fail to live up to intended exceptional presentation?"
The PolistreamBLACK system from Screen uses DVB Bitmaps at sub-pixel level to generate high quality subtitles and their decoder technology is already there for producing them in 4K.
Glover added: "We know that decoder manufacturers are working on 4K too and so would urge them to talk to us with regards to testing 4K streams."
OTT Subtitling
The ability of delivering premium video services over the internet to television and other connected devices has presented a new and altogether different challenge for anyone provide accessibility services for viewers.
Most standard web-video players use a simple timed-text file for OTT subtitling (e.g. SRT for YouTube, DFXP for Flash and QuickTime and SMIL for Windows Media Player). However these solutions rely on this timed-text file being interpreted by the video player and as a result the appearance of the subtitles can differ between players and devices, with positioning being particularly inconsistent.
It is evident that some early implementations positioned text within a black box beneath the main video window and so the subtitles were never actually overlaid within the video picture area.
This means that the subtitle-author cannot ever be sure as to how the subtitles will appear in font, style or position.
For accurate and consistent presentation of subtitles on web and OTT content, Screen saw the need for a different solution to overcome the potential uncertainties.
Screen’s new OTT and web subtitling system offers a method for served web video playback that guarantees that subtitles are always displayed in the style intended regardless of the video player being used.
This effective solution also allows the viewer to select from several language streams and of course switch them off altogether, without the need to re-encode the video or host multiple copies.
The benefits of the Screen OTT web subtitle system include:
The producer has full creative control over style and position;
Text is clear as it’s not affected by the video compression;
It allows the viewer to select the language or turn subtitles off;
It uses standard subtitle file formats;
It can automatically adjust a broadcast version for the web via EDL
Second Screen Synchronisation
Crudely described, subtitles are a targeted form of timed metadata, so in their simplest form they contain text which is timed to video.
Subtitle preparation and management tools therefore are very suitable for preparing metadata other than subtitles which need to have an association with media time.
So using standard automation second event scheduling within a playout system, Screen’s subtitling transmission system PolistreamBLACK, can now be used to trigger interactive second screen content without the need for any secondary hardware.
Because Polistream is natively a multi-language subtitle transmission solution, Screen has developed a system whereby an additional language can be applied to transmit a timed metadata stream as a subtitle/caption file. This file can then trigger web page content along with countless viewer engagement and advertising possibilities.
Broadcasters can dynamically link their content with connected devices such as tablets and smartphones.
Character and presenter biographies can be activated for instance; advertising around product placement and interactive advert break triggering can all be efficiently employed.
Screen – IBC Hall 1 Stand C49
Screen Systems
Read the article in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here.

(MH/CD)