Milford TV

In 2017 Milford TV staff was tasked with finding a captioning solution for their Government channel.

Knowing at some point in the unknown future captioning would be a requirement for the channel, Milford wanted to be ahead of the curve.  After spending a lot of time and energy visiting vendor booths and seeing demos, Milford was presented with options that were extremely costly and required additional hardware and support.  Seeing as though Milford wanted to caption all Gov meetings they needed a solution that was flexible and didn’t cost an arm and a leg.  CASTUS entered the conversation after introducing Cloud Captioning tools that required zero hardware and cost about as much as the other systems warranty / support annual plan and the best part was- everything was included!  Set up, training and support all at no additional cost.  After reviewing the number of meetings annually Milford purchased 1,000 hours of live caption usage and an additional 1,000 hours for file based programs that were recorded and delivered for re-air on Milford TV.  Budgeting this was still a little tricky as the funds had to be divided between the Milford Commission on Disability, The Town, and the School Department. However, all parties took a look at the cost of having a CASTUS solution, versus what all parties would have to budget yearly or invest in upfront with other services. Once all information was presented, it was a no-brainer. All  parties agreed to contribute and after seeing the success and hearing the feedback after the first few meetings they unanimously agreed that they had made the right decision moving forward with CASTUS Cloud Services Live and File Based captioning.

Without having to purchase any additional hardware or software, Milford is able to scale the number of live meetings and programs they caption without any limitations.  They also have the added flexibility of being able to caption content from neighboring or distant towns as cross collaboration has become part of their weekly operation.

Prior to having the CASTUS workflow Milford used another common playout server and streaming service.  Even though they were newer and expensive services, these services still presented many limitations that hindered Milfords growth and reach.

The versatility, ease of use and functionality of the Castus server has allowed us to expand services we offer the residents of Milford at an affordable rate. Until Castus provided captioning, our ability to invest upward of 60K for a reliable captioning service was out of our reach.

We’ve been live captioning for over a year now. This includes in person, virtual, and hybrid models. The caption accuracy continues to impress us. It seems to be able to filter out background noise on virtual and hybrid style coverage, which was an unexpected surprise! We recently captioned a 2 hour long meeting, and from beginning to end, every word, name, number, and phrase was spot on!