izzi turns to Edgeware for live OTT subtitling
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 27 October 2020
Hot on the heels of taking on board a new Android TV solution, Mexican cable TV giant izzi has expanded its existing Edgeware TV CDN platform with the addition of new optical character recognition (OCR) subtitling features for the izzi TV service.
izzi cable 27Oct2020
Through a custom launcher for the Android TV Operator Tier, izzi TV enables subscribers to enjoy live and on-demand content with the Android environment offering access to the Google Play Store, applications such as Netflix and YouTube and the built-in Chromecast digital media player.

izzi is also a long-time Edgeware customer and in a recent expansion in 2018 added improved time-shift TV services to its TV CDN platform for more than 500,000 subscribers, enabling viewers to pause and rewind up to three hours of live TV. By adding Cavena OCR subtitling, Edgeware says that izzi will be able to add Spanish subtitles on the fly across 75 channels, ensuring full support for accurately displayed subtitles on all devices and content. It will also allow viewers to activate and deactivate subtitles as they wish.

Explaining the reason for the uptake of the new technology, Edgeware noted that TV subtitles are traditionally delivered as images or bitmaps, which it said worked well for conventional set-top boxes, but are not supported by OTT streaming formats like HLS, MPEG-DASH and MSS. The new subtitling solution uses OCR to automatically and instantly transcode DVB bitmap subtitles to text-based subtitle formats. This says Edgeware enables accurate and high-quality subtitles to be prepared for any format that is needed for multi-device OTT delivery – to any client, in any screen size and in any language.

“Being able to provide accurate and robust subtitling across a range of formats and device types is an important requirement for our service,” remarked izzi video and hubs director Carlos Eduardo Romero. “By enhancing the accessibility of our content, we’re able to offer our customers a more engaging, higher-quality experience and support the future growth of our OTT content delivery.”

“As OTT services continue to attract more and more end users, subtitling must be at the same high quality as it is for traditional broadcast viewing – and be delivered across all screens,” added Johan Bolin, chief product and technology officer at Edgeware. “Furthermore, subtitling is increasingly important to facilitate new user behaviour. With more people watching TV on the go, and therefore in noisy environments, it’s essential for subtitles to complement the audio and enhance the viewing experience.”