ENCO, a Michigan-based company specializing in technology for radio and television broadcasting, announced July 6 that it has acquired TranslateTV (TTV) and Sentinel Solutions.
By acquiring TTV, ENCO’s leadership believes the company will be better suited to serve Spanish-speaking audiences by providing real-time translations of captions for English programming. TTV, which was previously owned by Vox Frontera, has a client base including The Tonight Show and local news stations around the U.S. — ENCO will continue to work with these clients to provide Spanish translations of their closed captioning.
“We look forward to supporting TTV’s legacy customers and bringing them into the ENCO family,” said ENCO president Ken Frommert “We will develop and innovate the TTV platform for new applications and use cases, while bringing 24/7 product and technical support to the existing TTV client base.”
ENCO already offers translations of closed captioning in 45 different languages (Spanish included) through its enTranslate service. However, this service only allows for cloud-based processing — by acquiring TTV, ENCO will be able to more efficiently offer Spanish translations for clients who “prefer to host their own systems and remain independent of the cloud.”
“Vox Frontera has made a strategic decision to focus our company resources on other development efforts,” said Gregory Schmidt, the CEO of Vox Frontera. “We know that ENCO offers best-in-class in automated broadcast captioning, and is a worthy successor that will serve our customers well.”
Both enTranslate and TTV utilize artificial intelligence to produce translated closed captioning. ENCO’s enCaption system creates closed captions from the audio input of the television programming, which will then be translated into Spanish through TTV.
“We will enable this technology to natively accept live and prerecorded audio feeds and automatically convert them to text,” Frommert said. “Our same workflow will inject these translations onto multiple consumer platforms, presenting live, accurate captions on TV sets, desktop, laptops, and mobile devices.”
