OCR Subtitling by Edgeware

Edgeware, our strategic partner, that provides systems to deliver modern TV services over the Internet at a huge scale to operators and content providers, enhanced their portfolio of products and services with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) SUBTITLING.

Edgeware’s Cavena-based transcoding of subtitles provides a simple and quick way to prepare subtitles for OTT delivery. With the capabilities to deliver high quality subtitles to any client, in any screen size and for any character set, the OCR Subtitling is one of the key factors for delivering the best quality of experience (QoE) for the OTT TV viewers. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, the image-based subtitles are automatically – and instantly – transcoded to text-based subtitles and ready for distribution to the client device. The OCR subtitling solution supports multiple languages, including Asian languages. In addition, it transcodes the subtitles within frames which enables instantaneous OTT delivery in any ABR format.

The deployment of the Edgeware’s OCR subtitling solution presents an added value for operators offering a Multilanguage selection on client applications.

Today, most of the content is delivered with DVB subtitles, which unfortunately are not supported in the OTT environment. Operators’ option for the OTT environment is to burn in the subtitles when transcoding the content, which is a method with many drawbacks.

Firstly, only one language can be burned in to the video, so operators who are offering streams in multiple languages need to prepare multiple video streams, each with a different burned-in language, which at the end of the day results in additional transcoding cost for the operator. For example, if an operator has subtitles in two different languages and 100 channels, it needs to transcode 200 channels, which is a 100% increase of the transcoding cost.

Secondly, presenting the language selection, including the option to watch content totally without any subtitles in a user-friendly manner, can be difficult.

Thirdly, the low resolution of DVB images for HD channels results in blurry and low-quality subtitle images on big TV screens.

Beenius, in cooperation with Edgeware, offer an OCR transcoding solution for all incoming DVB bitmaps. With Beenius’ support, operators can offer one channel with multiple language selection that can be easily changed and managed on the client devices. This way viewers can change the subtitle or audio during the playout of his favourite video.