Ai-Media signs 3 year captioning contact renewal with Sky News Australia
Ai-Media has renewed its captioning contract with Sky News Australia for another three years.
The announcement:
Access Innovation Holdings Limited (Ai-Media or Company) (ASX: AIM), a global provider of technology-driven captioning, transcription and translation services, is pleased to announce the three-year renewal of its contract with top five customer Sky News Australia, with Ai-Media’s new Smart ASRTM technology enabling the introduction of live 24/7 captioning of the channel for the first time.
Under the terms of the new partnership agreement, Ai-Media will provide Sky News Australia with both its human-curated Live Premium captioning service and its newly launched Smart ASRTM technology, which delivers a step change improvement on out-of-the-box automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools.
The use of Smart ASRTM will enable Sky News Australia to offer its viewers 24/7 captioning on the Sky News channel for the first time. Independent audits have confirmed the ability of Smart ASRTM to deliver consistently high-quality captioning for live news.
In line with the improved viewer experience, it is anticipated that Sky News Australia’s total spend with Ai-Media will increase under the new contract.
Smart ASRTM, which was launched in April 2021, is Ai-Media’s higher-margin live product which does not require real-time human curation and follows several years of in-house automation technology development. Smart ASRTM combines the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning automation with a final layer of human-curated, session-specific custom ASR dictionaries. By layering Ai-Media’s technology on existing ASR products, Smart ASRTM delivers a significant improvement over the performance of out-of-the-box ASR products in market, as independently audited.
Smart ASRTM is a key component of Ai-Media’s product suite, which has been boosted through the transformational acquisition of US-based video and captioning leader EEG Enterprises, Inc. and its flagship Lexi ASR product. The acquisition of EEG, which completed in May 2021, establishes Ai-Media as a vertically integrated provider of captioning technology, with a full suite of products to match customer requirements.
Ai-Media Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tony Abrahams said the partnership with Sky News Australia confirmed the potential of Smart ASRTM technology to open up significant growth opportunities for the Company in the Live Broadcast and Live Enterprise product lines, in multiple languages.
“Our continuing partnership with Sky News Australia focuses on technology innovation and automation. We’re delighted to launch Smart ASRTM on Sky News Australia, providing 24/7 access to captioning for the very first time at a quality level that can be relied upon by viewers,” Mr Abrahams said.
Ai-Media reaffirms its FY21 prospectus forecast, including Services revenue of $43.8 million, gross profit of $18.1 million and a pro forma EBITDA loss of ($4.8 million). Revenue from the
acquisitions of Caption IT and CaptionAccess in January are expected to add a further US$1.1 million in the second half of FY21. Revenue from EEG in May and June is additional to this forecast.
Source: Ai-Media media release
