CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY / WELT TV

AI meets Accessibility: How WELT subtitles live news in real time

INDUSTRY

Broadcasting & Media

PRODUCT

Deep Live Hub

BENEFITS

24/7 live subtitling for improved accessibility
Compliance with European Accessibility Act (EAA) regulations
Significant cost savings compared to manual subtitling
Real-time multilingual support for broader audience reach
Seamless integration into WELT TV’s broadcast workflow

Links

Customer success story: WELT relies on AI-supported live subtitling with aiconix for round-the-clock accessibility

WELT TV, Axel Springer’s news channel, has taken up the challenge of making its content accessible to a wider audience. In light of the increasing demand for accessible content, WELT decided to integrate the innovative AI subtitling solution from Aiconix as early as 2022. This enables live content to be subtitled efficiently and cost-effectively, making it accessible to a wide range of viewers.

The workflow - efficient and seamlessly integrated

The solution, based on the Deep Live Hub, enables a smooth workflow that supports the entire transmission process. The WELT TV programme is transmitted to the Aiconix cloud via an RTMP stream. Aiconix creates the subtitles in real time and provides them as an HLS stream. The subtitles are recorded by the TV station’s subtitle inserters and seamlessly integrated into the broadcast programme and played out to viewers. Distribution is currently exclusively via satellite reception for WELT TV in HD.

“Our aim is to make the WELT TV programme accessible to as wide an audience as possible. I am therefore all the more pleased that we have a strong partner at our side in aiconix, who is expanding our accessible offering. This enables us to offer our viewers the WELT TV programme with subtitles around the clock.

Thorsten Prohm

CTO @ WELT TV

Advantages of AI-supported live subtitling from Aiconix

With the introduction of the AI solution from Aiconix, WELT TV can offer viewers reliable subtitling around the clock. Unlike traditional manual subtitling, which is expensive and time-consuming for live broadcasts, Aiconix offers a flexible and cost-effective alternative. The AI technology makes it possible to create subtitles in real time – a crucial requirement for a news broadcaster that needs to be able to deliver live content even in the early hours of the morning.

Improved accessibility:

The upcoming EAA regulations will make the provision of subtitles for audiovisual content mandatory and provide for fines for non-compliance. AI captioning technology helps broadcast and streaming services to fulfil these requirements and ensure that content is accessible to people with hearing impairments and a wider global audience.

Speed and scalability

Unlike manual captioning, which takes a lot of time, AI-powered live captions can be created in real time around the clock. This is particularly beneficial for live broadcasts such as news, sports and events where instant accessibility is crucial.
Cost efficiency

The cost of manual subtitling can be prohibitive for many media providers, especially for live regional content. AI significantly reduces these costs and enables implementation at a fraction of the cost.
Global reach

AI-supported subtitling can easily support multiple languages to reach a wider audience. The platform also allows this to be done on an ad hoc basis, such as during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when WELT made its subtitles available to refugees in Russian.
Integrated workflow

Subtitles are transferred directly from the inserter to the broadcast path, giving viewers the experience they're used to, while AI transcription is seamlessly integrated in the background.

Increased accessibility and legal compliance:

The requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which comes into force in 2025, set clear standards for the accessibility of audiovisual content. The AI-based subtitling solution from aiconix has been helping WELT to make its content accessible to people with hearing impairments and a global audience for years. WELT not only strengthens its market presence, but also fulfils the inclusion and sustainability goals of Axel Springer Verlag.

Deep Live Hub: Live subtitling via teletext

The DeepVA platform with the Deep Live Hub enables the real-time transcription of spoken content into text and forms the basis for the creation of live subtitles. The AI models of the DeepVA platform are also trained to recognise languages and thus provide suitable translations, making them extremely effective for the live translation and transcription of other media formats.

Technically, DeepVA processes the live audio stream and generates subtitles, which can be delivered via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), burnt into the file or our own AMT protocol.

You can find out more about our own AMT protocol and its benefits here.

Via inserter from Albrecht Elektronik to teletext

For integration into linear distribution channels and their teletext, Aiconix works with SDI insertion technologies from partners such as Stream Engineering by Jochen Albrecht. Albrecht’s inserter enables the embedding of these AI-generated subtitles into an SDI signal using international teletext standards.

WELT sends the stream to the Deep Live Hub and the resulting HLS stream is retrieved by the inserter’s CPU. The inserter then merges the already encoded live stream from WELT TV with the HLS stream and encodes the whole thing back into the SDI signal.

The system works seamlessly, with multiple endpoints, to integrate the subtitles into both HD and SD signals in parallel. The finished signals are then distributed to consumers via satellite.

Conclusion

With this workflow, we are able to subtitle one of Germany’s leading news channels live around the clock – even at 2 a.m. – and at low cost. And thanks to the platform approach, spontaneous additional solutions, such as a Russian-language channel, can also be realised.

The collaboration with Aiconix has enabled WELT TV to realise a pioneering solution for accessible live broadcasts. The innovative AI-supported technology and seamless workflow ensure that WELT TV not only makes a valuable contribution to inclusion, but is also flexible in offering new or additional language variants.