Limecraft Helps SVT Move Closer To Digital-First Strategy

Sveriges Television AB (SVT) is Sweden's national public TV broadcaster and online streaming platform.

As a publicly funded organisation, SVT has a very strong public service remit and the broadcaster recently became the first in Europe to provide subtitles for 100% of its on-demand news content.

SVT has been a significant Avid customer for many years. To further benefit from the fast pace of technical development in the industry, SVT recently decided to also partner up with Limecraft and Woody Tech. Tasked with the mission of creating an easy-to-use and fast turnaround workflow for non-technical personnel, Limecraft provided an innovative subtitling plugin that integrates seamlessly with SVT’s production environment.

"All modern media organisations are constantly grappling with the twin issues of technology and efficiency," noted Olof Appelqvist, Head of Post Production with SVT. "SVT previously committed to providing subtitles or captions for 95% of our content but a great deal of our online content is short-form, and the subtitling process has always been very manual and time-consuming. With our journalists taking increasing responsibility for subtitle creation, it became clear we needed to find a better way of meeting our responsibilities."

Thanks to this new integration, users can create AI-generated subtitles with one single button press within the production environment, dramatically speeding up the process and improving efficiency. As a result, the company’s creators and journalists are now provided with a user-friendly workflow empowering them to handle this task themselves.

"The introduction of innovative new technology is always a challenge, and change management is a critical success factor," commented Limecraft co-founder Maarten Verwaest. "However, this solution is a great example of technology bringing demonstrable efficiency benefits and simplifying workflows.” Appelqvist at SVT agrees: “This solution has enabled us to redeploy human resource into other areas of the business and it is saving us a significant amount of money – millions of Swedish Krona per year. This, in turn, enables us to maintain the quantity and increase the quality of our news output without any sacrifice, as well as providing a better experience to our deaf and hearing-impaired viewers. The business case was extremely compelling and we’ve been delighted with the implementation, with the technical support and training received from Limecraft, and with the overall result. We’re also very happy to be an early adopter of this technology, forging a path that we’re sure other broadcasters will want to follow."

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