Softel announced today that Bulgarian satellite operator Bulsatcom has installed Softel's Swift™ TX subtitle/caption management and delivery solution to provide accurately synchronized DVB bitmap subtitles for its turnaround services to various European countries.
Turnaround services are provided by cable or satellite operators by assembling packages from existing sources and bringing them together with local or regional content channels. During the decoding and re-encoding involved, the timing of subtitles in the incoming streams can be disrupted or destroyed, resulting in misalignment from the video. The challenge for broadcasters is to preserve the subtitle content present in the incoming stream and ensure that retransmission is correctly timed with the video.
"We were looking for a subtitling retiming solution for 19 of our turnaround services, totaling 31 feeds of subtitles, where some services have multiple subtitle feeds," says Maxim Zayakov, Bulsatcom CEO. "We also wanted an installation that allowed for future expansion, and we were impressed with the flexibility and architecture of the Softel Swift TX. We felt the company understood our needs and trusted their extensive experience in this domain."
The Softel Swift TX integrates seamlessly with broadcast workflows, supporting an extensive range of input file formats. It allows transmission to a range of formats such as DVB-bitmap, DVB-text, CEA608 and CEA708 closed captioning, Open (burn-in) and Teletext, as well as handling other ancillary data such as XDS. Configured as a multichannel unit, Swift TX enables rack consolidation and savings on equipment, power and cooling costs. It provides outstanding reliability and flexibility for master/standby and 'N+1' configurations, with superior output quality delivered by a specially developed font rendering engine.
"Softel's Swift TX solution provides accurate and consistent delay and retransmission of incoming subtitle packets for turnaround services," says Sam Pemberton, Softel CEO. "It is a proven and highly scalable solution based on standard server hardware that allows broadcasters to optimize operational efficiency and reduce workflow complexity. We are proud to have been chosen as Bulsatcom's supplier of choice for this important area."
