“A vendor's total value proposition can be determined by evaluating factors such as price, responsiveness, past performance, support history, and proven ability to deliver on time and within budget. The sum of these factors must drive sourcing and procurement decisions. Carbon checked all those boxes.”
Director, Media Productions
Key Benefits
- Improves experience for production team resulting in better broadcast results
- Turnaround time for text content is exponentially faster than previous solutions
- Speech-to-text drafts create content for all broadcasts at a fraction of the cost
- Synced media and text content can be more easily searched and exported for reuse
- User friendly features and speech-to-text accuracy better than competitors
Background
As one of the largest broadcasters for national and world news, the company includes bureaus across the globe and influential, critically acclaimed programs that provide original reporting, interviews, investigations, and analysis of stories 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are dedicated to accurate reporting on breaking and developing stories and having text content that is synced to broadcast recordings plays a key role. On average, they transcribe about 5,000 hours annually and have up to 250 different users that require access to their media production systems. Their typical turnaround time is 24-48 hours but having the ability to create text content from media almost instantly gives them an advantage over their competition. The broadcaster utilizes Sony CI to store all media data so having a simple workflow to import/export text content and synced videos is crucial.
The Challenge
Before working with VIQ, the broadcast company attempted using independent contractors and services from Transcript Associates to meet their content creation needs, but this proved to be too costly and added extra steps to increasingly tight deadlines. Fortunately, they were able to find more reliable transcription services with VIQ, but still needed a fast solution to convert all media broadcasts into text content that is quickly searchable and can be synced with the video recording within minutes, not hours. This caused them to search for speech-to-text technology, such as Rev and Trint, but were not able to find the features and accuracy they needed until they found Carbon. The bad news was that due to a recent acquisition, the Carbon platform was planned to be sunset. Given the trusted partnership VIQ Media Transcription, their dedication to evolve the broadcaster’s workflow and plan to expand further into the media industry, it was a natural progression for the broadcaster and VIQ to continue to keep the next best thing for the media industry on the market.
The Solution
Having established a relationship with VIQ Solutions from previously utilizing their Transcription Services, it was an easy transition to implement Carbon with the option to order professional editing for verbatim content when needed. The broadcaster uses the AI-powered, speech-to-text in Carbon to create text content from almost all their national news and magazine style media that are typically multi-cam interviews, resulting in an abundance of video. For example, one 45-minute broadcast may result in 10-20 hours of total footage. The ability for any production team member to quickly convert a media recording to text and use it to search for a specific keyword or timecode in the content to edit or extract, streamlines production and facilitates efficient news stories. Carbon also helps speed reviewing and editing of archived content that needs to be pulled from Sony CI. The collaboration of VIQ and the media broadcaster will only continue to enhance the workflow and capabilities of Carbon in the future.
The Results
Having all broadcast recordings automatically converted to searchable, editable text content that is synced to the video is a gamechanger that helps better understand what’s going on in the recording. Media broadcast is a messy world with background noise, multiple speakers so visual context is important as it results in better accuracy. Having 24/7, self-service accessibility to obtain near real-time content synced to media recordings has significantly improved the overall production process. Carbon offers user friendly features to quickly search and edit the AI-generated text content and quickly submit an order for professional editing by media experts at the click of a button, while many competitive products only offer one or the other. Other departments, such as Public Relations and Digital Assets, can also quickly search for sound bites and media clips from off-air or archived media for social media and call-back stories quicker than before. With VIQ at the helm of Carbon’s development, the broadcaster has the confidence in the evolution of the platform to further meet their needs.