CCSUBS hosted a meetup in Berlin, co-located with the Media Web Symposium at Fraunhofer Fokus. 25 stakeholders representing content providers, service providers and product vendors reviewed the outcome of the NAB meet-up in April and discussed possible follow-up activities (presentations).

Summary

The participants of the meetup confirmed several technical challenges for live subtitling and captioning that have been documented in the NAB meeting report, including:

• Preserving fidelity throughout the chain;
• Maintaining temporal synchronization between audio, video and timed text; and
• Supporting languages with a non-Latin character set.

The variety of protocols and formats used (e.g. by different subtitling and caption vendors) for the transmission of audio, video and subtitles was also identified as major obstacle. There is an obvious need for implementations of modern standards for live subtitle contribution.

While an agreed set of best practices for captioning and subtitling in streaming is desirable in the long term, stakeholders need to respond to market needs immediately. Therefore, company-specific live delivery specifications can initially be published and provided to market participants for consideration. These specifications could form the basis for further collaborative work.

Bill McLaughlin from AI media has started an activity for TTML interop testing. Interested parties can contact him directly.

Options for setting up a member-led and funded group were presented. There was no preference among the participants. The alternative of doing the work in an existing SDO group was mentioned.

Acknowledgements

CCSUBS would like to thank event organizers and chairs Andreas Tai (a2a11y) and Pierre-Anthony Lemieux (Sandflow Consulting); event coordinators Peggy Krüger and Stephan Steglich (Fraunhofer Fokus); supporter Fraunhofer FOKUS; and event sponsor Netflix.

Attendees

Gunnar Adler (Deutsche Telekom), Semih Altinay (Transperfect), Rafael Bermudez (3Cat), Erik Buitinga (NPO), Rafael Caricio (Netflix), Laurence Chachay (EVA France), Christian Fuhrhop (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Kemal Görgülü (arte.tv), Ethan Hokyun Kim (GloZ Inc.), Simon Jenkins (TVT), Bobby Johar (Blu Digital Group), Tim YoungHoon Jung (XL8 Inc.), Martin Lasak (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Jordi Mata (3Cat), Hewson Maxwell (Red Bee Media), Nigel Megitt (BBC), Tammy Na (GloZ Inc.), Sevan Nazarian (Transperfect), Chris Needham (BBC), Jan Outters (Ateme), Patrick Pearson (Netflix), Jon Piesing (TP Vision), Dominique Riquart (France TV Studio), Serge Sepulcre (EVA France), Andreas Tai (a2a11y)