International. ENCO's aggressive growth trajectory continues with the acquisition of DoCaption, a developer and manufacturer of subtitles, subtitling and ancillary data solutions for the AV and broadcast industries.
The announcement marks ENCO's third commercial acquisition in the past 12 months, following acquisitions of TranslateTV last July and Rushworks in January. ENCO closed the DoCaption deal on July 1, and ENCO retained the entire product line, intellectual property, personnel and business operations of DoCaption based in Valence, France.
ENCO's acquisition of DoCaption expands ENCO's reach into captioning workflows for broadcast and broadcast applications. ENCO has long worked with DoCaption to deliver automated live captions and insert closed captions into live streams.
The acquisition means ENCO can now offer more complete, integrated and cost-effective solutions for broadcasters and media companies, such as OTT channels, MVPD and streaming services. Similarly, ENCO can offer more complete solutions for subtitling meetings, conferences and presentations in live AV environments.
ENCO will also add an entirely new product line with the acquisition of DoCaption. DoCaption offers a wide range of auxiliary data transmission solutions that cross the spectrum of encoding, conversion and transcoding, and monitoring. DoCaption's products also include specific solutions for SCTE 104 metadata signage and insertion for ad markers, SMPTE timecode generation for synchronization, marker data encoding for venue displays, and integrated open caption generators and manipulators.
DoCaption specializes in the development of integrated hardware and software solutions across all of its product lines. As DoCaption develops all hardware in-house, ENCO and DoCaption engineers are free to develop more complete solutions with future media workflow opportunities in mind.
"DoCaption represents our most strategic acquisition to date when it comes to future product and business development," said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. "Immediately, we can now sell caption encoders alongside our local and cloud-based enCaption systems to deliver more flexible and affordable single-source solutions. In the future, our combined team of engineers can work together and leverage DoCaption's intellectual property to develop new integrated applications that address emerging standards and customer requirements. That includes innovating new solutions that represent a convergence of our strengths to address future captioning workflows."
DoCaption products are available worldwide today and are widely used in Europe, Australia and the Americas, according to co-founder and director of global product management and sales, Renaud Desportes. "We bring strong expertise in broadcast standards and subtitles in all parts of the world, and we understand how to interconnect these different systems. Our customers rely on us to develop solutions that support various standards, no frame lag, very fast and smooth response, and very reliable network operation. Working together with ENCO allows us to better serve new customers with continuous innovation, global distribution and advanced support."
