NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

June 1, 2010

NCI Announces DSMM, a significant advancement in eliminating modem drops

New technology helps eliminate closed captioning service disruptions

Background
For decades, modem drops have been the cause of closed captioning service disruptions, resulting in loss of captions for minutes at a time on programs captioned using real-time captioning methods. There are many ways errors are introduced as the closed captioning signal travels from the captioner to the TV control center through the encoder through transmission to the viewer, through the TV decoder and finally to the viewer's screen. One of the most significant problems in this journey is modem drops. Modem drops can occur once to several times a day and almost always result in minutes of interruption of closed captioning. To correct the problem, studio technicians are pulled off their duties to reset electronics.

NCI's New Technology
NCI has developed a new technology, DSMM, to virtually eliminate modem drops. The technology is implemented completely on the NCI end and there is no change necessary on the broadcaster's end. This is an expensive technology involving advanced hardware and DSP software, and it is being rolled out this year. NCI has already implemented it for about 30% of our clients and expects to be at 100% by the end of this year. NCI has currently implemented double redundancy and is in the process of installing triple redundancy of this new technology with systems at each of our domestic offices when the system is fully deployed.

Results
The result of this change has been dramatic - nearly a total elimination of modem drops. For example, one client recently experienced high rates of disconnects - about one disconnect every day. Since employing the new DSMM technology on April 12, 2010, we have not experienced a single modem drop.

For additional information, contact:

Your NCI account executive or

Juan Mario Agudelo
National Director of Sales and Marketing
703-917-7619
jagudelo@ncicap.org

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DSP - Digital Signal Processing
DSMM - NCI's DSP Sequencing Modem Methodology

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