Pilot-A Presentation and Deliverables 2014 & 2015
Pilot-A public Deliverables 2014 and 2015
Pilot-A Presentation, Objectives and HbbTV 2.0 advancements
Across Europe, broadcasters are working to provide subtitles on multiple platforms for individuals who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, or do not have sufficient language skills to understand the content without textual support either in the original or foreign languages. The main challenge is to provide subtitles tailored to the specific needs of the end-users in terms of channels, platforms and consumption requirements. This requires a well-conceived production and distribution strategy that allows for the exchange of subtitles and their automatic re-purposing producing quality and impact-driven access services for multiple platforms.
This pilot will make available advanced HbbTV automatic multilingual subtitling functionalities, building up on technology currently under development in the European SME-DCL SAVAS and CIP-PSP SUMAT 1 projects.
– Pilot-A objectives
The four core objectives of this sub-pilot respond to the above chances and challenges which will be tackled in large scale trials in Portugal, Germany and Spain, and partly also in Switzerland.
1- A prototypical subtitle production workflow chain for multi-platform purpose for broadcasters which enables basic (HbbTV1.1/1.5) and potentially advanced (HbbTV 2.0) customized HbbTV subtitling services aligned with existing subtitling services and integrates broadcast news transcription systems for automatic subtitling and subtitle translation;
2- HbbTV-based Video on Demand (VoD) services allowing users to choose through an application to add subtitles and to customise them for large scale provision and testing in Portugal, Germany (Berlin-Brandenburg), and Spain (Catalonia);
3- An HbbTV-based News service allowing users to access live content automatically subtitled and translated to multiple languages for testing in Spain (Catalonia);
4- Complementary experience testing under lab conditions of subtitling in the hybrid and IP-world involving users from the target groups, which will deliver metrics for Quality of Service and prepare the Pilots as described above.
– Pilot-A & HBBTV 2.0:
-
HbbTV 1.0 and 1.5
HbbTV terminals deployed today do not support subtitles for broadband content natively. However, HbbTV terminals provide sufficient information on the playback position for on-demand content to applications so subtitles can be added by rendering them in the application. The advantage of doing this in the application is the flexibility to offer user customized subtitles, e.g. by adjusting the font size. This will be done in the large scale trials of the project. In combination with live content via broadband HbbTV 1.X rendering subtitles is not possible neither via the terminal nor the application. HbbTV 2.0 adds support for EBU-TT-D as a subtitle format (TTML) for broadband content. Within the trials of this pilot this format shall be used in order to minimize later migration efforts to HbbTV 2.0 services.
-
HbbTV 2.0
The next version of the HbbTV specification removes the lack of subtitle support for broadband services on TV. On demand content can be associated with out-of-band EBU-TT-D documents and content based on MPEG-DASH can have embedded EBU-TT-D subtitles, which enables subtitles also for live streaming via the internet. It is planned to extend the DASH prototype, which is also used by other pilots for live streaming (e.g. Pilot-D), to support segmenting and embedding of EBU-TT-D documents. A proof-of-concept showcase in 2015 shall show an end-to-end system of MPEG-DASH live content with EBU-TT-D subtitles.
1 The SAVAS project: Sharing Audio Visual language resources for Automatic Subtitling, learn more.
The SUMAT project: Subtitling by Machine Translation, learn more.