SysMedia Supply Subtitling Solution For RTV Gelderland

SysMedia has supplied and installed a comprehensive subtitling solution for Dutch broadcaster RTV Gelderland. The order, which has been overseen by the company’s regional partner, Progress Media, includes WinCAPS Live with SpeakTITLE, a TDG-7 teletext inserter and a Teletext Rebroadcast Decoder.


RTV Gelderland is the sole public regional broadcaster for the Dutch province of Gelderland, serving approximately two million inhabitants. It provides regional news and “infotainment” each evening in the form of a 20-minute news bulletin followed by a themed 40-minute show. These programmes are then repeated each hour until close and again the following morning.
The station is distributed via cable, satellite and DTT and is free-to-air. The challenge was to improve workflow and produce subtitles for this material quickly and efficiently; previously it was only possible to subtitle the later evening editions of the news programme.


The SysMedia WinCAPS live subtitling system enables initial timed subtitles to be produced and saved in one pass, speeding up the workflow significantly. Using WinCAPS, RTV Gelderland can now provide subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing viewers at least two hours earlier than previously possible – and in due course also cover the show that follows. Using live re-speaking where no script is available, they can now subtitle the first (18:00) edition of the news live, then edit the saved output to remove any errors ready for automatic playout from the 19:00 edition onwards.


“Apart from solving the workflow issues with our new SpeechTime feature, we also solved the problem of ensuring that the existing teletext magazine service would not be affected by the new live subtitling facility. Our Teletext Rebroadcast Decoder takes the output of the existing teletext system (including the subtitles for the repeat editions) and merges it with the live subtitles from WinCAPS,” said John Boulton, Technical Sales Manager, SysMedia.


Martin Ouburg, Technical Manager for RTV Gelderland said: “With this technology we will be able to subtitle more content than previously - and this is important to us because most of our content is live or available only close to broadcast time. We have also been able to improve efficiency and keep costs within the funds provided by the regional government for this purpose.”
(DS)