ENCO is expanding its captioning services with the acquisition of DoCaption, a developer and manufacturer of captioning, subtitling and ancillary data solutions for the broadcast and AV industries. The announcement, made on July 24, marks ENCO’s third business acquisition in the past 12 months — following the acquisitions of TranslateTV last July and RUSHWORKS in January.
With the acquisition, ENCO will add a new product line to captioning offerings. DoCaption offers broadcast ancillary data solutions that cross the encoding, conversion and transcoding and monitoring spectrum, said ENCO in a press release. DoCaption’s products also include 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.
“ENCO has long worked with DoCaption to deliver live, automated captions and insert closed captions into live broadcasts,” said ENCO in the release. “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.”
According to the company press release, ENCO closed the DoCaption deal on July 1, with ENCO retaining DoCaption’s product line, intellectual property, staff and business operations based in Valence, France. Founded in 1983, ENCO is based in Novi, Mich.
DoCaption specializes in developing embedded, integrated hardware and software solutions, which are made in-house. Established in 2009, DoCaption products are available in Europe, Australia and the Americas, according to Renaud Desportes, Do Caption’s co-founder and director of worldwide sales.
Ken Frommert, president of ENCO, said, “DoCaption represents our most strategic acquisition to date as it pertains to future product and business development. 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.”
At the 2023 NAB Show, ENCO highlighted new features and benefits of its fifth-generation enCaption automated live captioning and transcription solution, including an updated enTranslate engine. The company has also updated its WebDAD 3.0 remote radio automation interface. During the convention, ENCO spoke to its recent acquisition of the Rushworks line and promised another product announcement yet to come.
