By: Fereidoon Khosravi

During my face-to-face meetings and discussions with customers (during the pre-COVID times, remember those days?!) an interesting theme started to emerge. At first, it was subtle but quickly it became clear to me what they were asking for (the ‘aha’ moment!). Aside from using our QC tools (Pulsar & Quasar) for media (audio/video) QC, many of them were asking if we could do something similar for their caption and subtitle files in Pulsar or Quasar! It turns out that caption file QC and correction is quite a time consuming effort, one that for the most part was manual and labor-intensive, without a very good automated solution available. They had been looking for an automated way to not only QC their Caption files, but many also preferred an automated or interactive way to review and correct the files as well.

After studying their requirements carefully, we realized what our customers were looking for, required a set of new functionality, features, and a different interface that was best suited as a new offering which could be used in conjunction with our existing QC tools.

And now after months of hard work, and collaboration with some key customers who helped us fine tune the functionality, we are super excited to announce, ‘CapMate’, a cloud-based SaaS solution for verification *and* correction of side car caption and subtitle files!

And the name says it all, ‘Cap’ and ‘Mate’! A companion to help deal with caption related issues!

We heard our customers loud and clear and here are a few interesting features that helps CapMate stand out:

• It is a native-cloud solution. It means it can scale up and down seamlessly providing dynamic scalability to the customers.
• It has a usage-based pricing model, so our customers can sign up for a subscription plan that fits their volume of content.
• We even added an industry first ad-hoc pricing! So those who don’t have ongoing caption need, can just sign up and pay for what they need, when they need it, without monthly commitment!
• Taking advantage of Machine Learning techniques, CapMate can provide a more accurate sync analysis and in fact does an amazing job in auto-fixing various Sync issues!
• CapMate can detect many of the pain points we have heard from our customers, from the technically challenging Standards compliance (like for SCC format) to determining whether the caption is overlaid on top of burnt-in text, to detecting profanity or spelling issues. As well as a comprehensive list of editing features!
• We paid very close attention to content security as we know that is so important to our customers; as well as scalability so our customers won’t have any bottlenecks processing large volumes of content at the same time! CapMate is capable of processing hundreds of titles at the same time.

Using CapMate, there is a significant saving of time and cost for QC of each caption file, as CapMate can analyze and report back all the issues in a matter of minutes! Customers can get a CapMate report and share it with their caption vendor to point out what needs to be corrected.

Jack Hurley, the Director of Digital Production at Cinedigm, one of our great early adopters, had this to say: “CapMate maintains both a robust and unique feature set for checking captions on the cloud. Our ability to leverage its capabilities has drastically increased our accuracy and efficiency in verifying our growing volume of captions received. As Cinedigm forges onward into the ever-changing FAST OTT landscape, we rely on CapMate to help us serve reliable, quality captions to our audience.”

For our customers who choose to correct the caption files themselves, or for our customers who are caption vendors, with the intuitive and easy to use CapMate interactive interface, the entire process of review and correction can be done in fraction of the time that it would take for the current manual review! The customer can choose to do auto-correction or make the corrections as they are reviewing the results, and generate a new clean caption file, right on the spot!

And then if you account for our scalability and our dynamic parallel processing capability, the customer can submit hundreds of titles at a time, and get them all analyzed in parallel and receive the results back at the same time! Imagine the savings in time!

With the introduction of CapMate, we are expanding and broadening the scope of what we consider ‘Quality Control’. We can now go beyond the wide range of QC features we have for audio and video in a media file and make sure all those caption and subtitle files also meet the customer requirements.

So all those months of being cooped up because of COVID was put to good use and we are excited to announce ‘CapMate’!

Get more details about CapMate here and contact us for a demo and free trial!

P.S. Check out the splashy launch video we made announcing CapMate! See if you can spot me!