Novi, Mich.-based, ENCO, the digital audio and program automation for radio stations and TV studios has acquired DoCaption, a developer and manufacturer of captioning, subtitling and ancillary data solutions for the broadcast and AV industries. The announcement marks ENCO’s third business acquisition in the past 12 months, following the acquisitions of TranslateTV last July and RUSHWORKS in January.
ENCO closed the DoCaption deal on July 1, with ENCO retaining DoCaption’s entire product line, intellectual property, staff and business operations based in Valence, France.
Integrated Solutions for Broadcasters & Media Companies
ENCO’s acquisition of DoCaption extends ENCO’s reach into captioning workflows for broadcast and AV applications. ENCO has long worked with DoCaption to deliver live, automated captions and insert closed captions into live broadcasts. According to the company, the acquisition means that ENCO can now offer more complete, integrated and cost-efficient solutions for broadcasters and media companies, such as OTT channels, MVPDs and streaming services.
Similarly, ENCO can offer more complete solutions to caption meetings, lectures, and presentations in live AV environments.
ENCO, DOCaption Future Solutions
ENCO says it will also add an entirely new product line with the DoCaption acquisition. DoCaption offers a broad range of broadcast ancillary data solutions that cross the encoding, conversion and transcoding, and monitoring spectrum. DoCaption’s products also include specific solutions for SCTE 104 metadata signaling and insertion for ad markers, SMPTE timecode generation for synchronization, scoreboard data encoding for venue displays and integrated open captions generators and keyers.
DoCaption specializes in developing embedded, integrated hardware and software solutions across its product lines. As DoCaption develops all hardware in-house, ENCO and DoCaption engineers can freely develop more complete solutions with future media workflow opportunities in mind, says the company.
“DoCaption represents our most strategic acquisition to date as it pertains to future product and business development,” says Ken Frommert, president of ENCO. “Immediately, we can now sell captioning encoders alongside our on-premises and cloud-based enCaption systems to offer more flexible and affordable single-source solutions. Moving forward, our combined team of engineers can work together and leverage DoCaption’s intellectual property to develop new on-board applications that address emerging standards and customer requirements. That includes innovating new solutions that represent a convergence of our strengths to serve future captioning workflows.”
DoCaption products are available globally today and widely used in Europe, Australia and the Americas, according to co-founder and director, Product Management and Worldwide Sales, Renaud Desportes. “We bring strong expertise in broadcast and captioning standards in every part of the world, and understand how to interconnect these different systems,” he says.
Desportes adds, “Our customers trust us to develop solutions that support various standards, with no frame delay, very fast and smooth response, and very reliable network operation. Working together with ENCO allows us to better serve new customers with continued innovation, global distribution, and advanced support.”
