Screen – Lifting Subtitling Technology To A New Level

From pioneering the first ever electronic subtitling system back in the 70s, Screen has been renowned globally ever since for their high-end subtitling transmission solutions and preparation software.

PolistreamBLACK Premium Subtitling Transmission – including 4K capability
Screen's Polistream subtitling transmission systems have been relied on and trusted by some of the world's largest broadcasters for many years with the evolutionary PolistreamBLACK system transforming subtitling transmission technology.
The energy efficient 1RU platform used by PolistreamBLACK supports the full range of Screen's Polistream interface cards providing a flexible and broad range of configurations to meet your requirements but by using the minimum number of platforms; satisfying tight space budgets.
PolistreamBLACK continues to tackle new challenges, first providing a high-end solution for the HD roll-out and now providing subtitle transmission for 4K content.
Screen believed that the extraordinary 4K viewing experience shouldn't be devalued for the hard-of-hearing or foreign language speakers, just because subtitles fail to live up to the exceptional presentation of the content.
The PolistreamBLACK system from Screen uses DVB Bitmaps at sub-pixel level to generate high quality subtitles and the decoder technology is in place for producing them in 4K.

WinCAPS Script Extractor – a quantum leap in processing efficiency
Screen specialises in making workflow processes more efficient. For subtitling or dubbing customers who rely on using scripts to increase their productivity, there was an imperative to speed up the process of extracting useful payload as quickly as possible from any script layout. Such payload might include speaker identification labels, dialogue, timecodes or feet-and-frames, scene boundaries, onscreen captions and explanations to assist translation.
Script Extractor is an assistive tool, designed to enable a user quickly to identify examples of the material of interest, and to automate the task of retrieving all similar instances from the script. Essentially the script is loaded and broken down into its constituent elements. The user highlights one or two items of each of the content types they are interested in. Using a sophisticated pattern matching algorithm, the Script Extractor then picks out similar content to be preserved, and ignores the other items.

Improving accessibility of content through Audio/Video Description
Accessibility of media to partially sighted audiences may be enhanced by the provision of additional information in the form of audio.
The traditional UK interpretation of accessibility for the partially sighted comes in the form of Audio Description, where visual cues within the video are described.
For material which is subtitled for the purposes of translation, the media is inaccessible to the blind or partially sighted. In this case, the use of spoken subtitles may provide the additional accessibility required.
Screen has developed an output driver for its Polistream subtitle transmission system which connects internally in the same way as all other output encoders. This specialist Polistream module receives 'subtitle texts' and renders them using SAPI 5 to drive a Text to Speech engine to produce an audio snippet.
We have also developed a module for our MediaMate offline processing framework. The spoken subtitles module allows 'subtitle text' files to be rendered to 48 kHz stereo WAV files, with or without a control track.
It behaves in a similar way to the Polistream implementation in terms of timing of audio and use of audio files, the generated audio file may then be simply attached to the media and played out alongside existing audio.

End-to-end HbbTV solutions
Screen has partnered with Icareus in Finland to provide complete end-to-end HbbTV solutions.
Between us, all the head-end and key applications can be supplied to provide a compelling service for viewers plus we can guide you in terms of best practice and connect you with set-top box manufacturers.
Enthusiasm for HbbTV is spreading around the world, especially with-free-to-air broadcasters and operators and so the need to evaluate the head-end, new set top boxes and relevant applications is paramount. Moreover, trials need to be conducted cost effectively.
Screen has therefore developed the HbbTV Toolbox that integrates closely with the Icareus head end platform allowing a host of applications and features to be delivered including high profile advertising and sponsorship features. Options can be made available on the way a TV programme is viewed using HbbTV Live and integration with the Extended EPG.

Screen will be exhibiting at IBC – C.149

The article can also be read in BFV online.

(IT/CD)