Link Electronics
Link Electronics was founded in 1989 on a principle of developing quality products at a competitive price for the broadcast industry. From the beginning Link developed state of the art products for both audio and video applications. Link continues that tradition today with over two hundred products in the line and more in development. In the decades since its founding the product offerings have evolved to support the latest technologies and industry standards. Link now serves broadcasters in the television market, municipalities, educational institutions, religious institutions and closed captioning services worldwide.
Nearly all products sold by Link are made here in the USA at their facility in Jackson, Missouri. Most products made by Link carry a 10 year warranty and Link provides 24/7 technical support on all products.
Bridge Digital carries the full line of Link Electronics Encoders/Decoders, Switchers/Routers, Embedders/De-Embedders, Converters and other quality products, but here we will highlight their unique and highly innovative Automated Closed Captioning equipment.
Superior Automated Closed Captioning
Captioning is not only a desired service, but is a requirement for ADA Compliance. Link Electronics ACE line consists of three units that provide a range of options to fit nearly any automatic captioning need. The ACE-2000, ACE-2100, and ACE-2200 are Automated Captioning Engines that receive audio containing speech and, using a cutting-edge computational linguistics program, convert speech to text and sends that text out with captioning data to be encoded by a closed captioning encoder. The ACE units are able to achieve an average of 95 percent accuracy in English and Spanish with an average delay of 3-5 seconds.
ACE 2000
The ACE-2000 can accept audio in many different ways. It can de-embed the first two channels of audio from an SDI input or an HDMI input. Balanced AES or balanced analog audio is another method that the ACE-2000 accepts audio. The unit also has the ability to receive streaming audio using http, tcp, udp, mmsh, and most types of rstp and rtmp. It also supports the most commonly used codex. The captioning data and text can be sent out by either RS 232 (Serial) or TCP/IP.
ACE 2100
The ACE-2100 is a network resource that can be used by any system on your existing network without requiring additional network or system resources. The textual transcription files can be reviewed, edited, or inserted off-line for post-production captioning. Some of the file types include text files, caption files, subtitle files, or time coded text files.
ACE 2200
The ACE-2200 is a combination of the ACE 2000 and ACE 2100 in a single unit and is capable of live captioning from one of multiple live sources, as well as being able to caption in post production, however, both programs cannot run simultaneously. This unit provides a one stop captioning solution for both live captioning and post production captioning.
All ACE units include a web based Graphical User Interface (GUI) that will allow remote control of this device. The GUI contains an event scheduler that allows the use of different audio inputs and caption outputs at different times. The units comes preset with standard audio and caption data outputs for Link encoders making the setup for the device simple. A keyboard, mouse, and monitor will be required to change the settings from the standard setup. These units are compatible with most closed captioning encoders or devices.
The system does not need to be “taught” and is updated regularly with an internet connection. Words can be manually entered into the system's dictionary to increase the ACE’s accuracy. To further ADA compliance, the ACE can identify individual speakers to provide a speaker ID with the automatic closed captions.
To learn more about any of these products, contact Bridge Digital today.