Automatic Sync Expands in Europe

Automatic Sync Technologies, a U.S. based company, funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is expanding services in Europe with the addition of Martin Laycock, European Director of Sales and Marketing. Martin has over twenty years experience in video resources for the Higher Education sector in the UK. Over the past five years he has been developing reusable accessible online video content and lecture capture systems.

AST has served UK and European customers for the past several years, and now is adding local resources to support the proliferation of Web video. AST offers high quality, cost-effective captioning, subtitling and transcription services for Web and broadcast media. AST serves over a thousand users, including the largest college systems in the world, The California State University System, and the California Community College System. The automated web-based system allows users to submit media for transcription, captioning and/or subtitling twenty-four hours a day, and to get subtitles back in minutes, or transcripts and subtitles in one-to-three business days. While the web-based system is automated, the transcription is performed by trained stenographers, not computerized speech recognition tools.

Government agencies, educational institutions, and media producers are frequently required by law to subtitle media to support deaf and hard of hearing individuals as part of equal opportunity legislation like the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).

Benefits of subtitling extend beyond just supporting disabled communities. By subtitling media, the text becomes searchable, allowing content to be discovered and more easily accessed in the preferred context. Transcripts can serve as a basis for foreign language translations. Research shows that providing text and audio content improves comprehension for many viewers.

For organizations that produce video content for broadcast and/or the web, AST delivers over 40 formats. For more information, please visit www.automaticsync.com. European clients wanting pricing or information on how to create an account, please email Martin directly.