Ep 7, S3 - NAB Recap: AI, Accessibility, and the Future of Government Video

Michelle - Intro: This podcast is for city communications, teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Dana: Hey everyone. Welcome to the special edition of the Government Video Podcast at NAB 2026. I'm Dana Healy and I'm joined here with the CEO of Tightrope Media Systems, JJ Parker. Hey, JJ. Hi everyone. Dana: So, you've been to NAB many, many times. I was actually trying to add it up and it's enough times that I can't actually remember when I started coming, but it had to have been in the very early two thousands. So I'm definitely above 20 years in a row. Might be close to 25. Dana: So you've seen a lot of themes throughout that whole arc of your career there. For sure. I mean, it was like analog to digital, to SDI to HD to 3D to 4K. Like all of these themes. One year it was drones. Tons of drones everywhere. It was awesome. Dana: So what are you seeing showing up for the theme for 2026? I'd say walking around the show and even the things that we're doing, of course, it's all about AI. Last year it was kind of like I would say a lot of almost AI hype. It was very, very new and it was like, Hey, here's a super neat magic trick. This year AI is pretty much in everything, but it's more subtle. It's more like proven that it works. It's in workflows and it's really more about making everybody more efficient than like a whizzbang feature. And you, and it's, and it's kind of subtly baked into the products now. It's not like the primary thing, the editing tools are still editing tools with a little AI enhancement, right? Same with our stuff. We're selling an accessibility tool with a little bit of AI enhancement, right? Sure. Dana: So, we serve government media, right? A lot of cities, a lot of counties. How do you see these AI features and workflows helping their, you know, workflow specifically? For government video, the ADA Title II was it, what is a big thing right? And the deadline for that was gonna be, was it this week? Next week. Dana: It was gonna be this week. It was gonna be this week, yeah. So obviously gearing up towards complying with that was really difficult, and specifically around the audio descriptions part because the human workflow, the manual effort to make audio descriptions, very time consuming, very costly. And in fact, too costly for our customers. It was kinda like they had no idea how they were gonna comply with this thing because it was gonna cost way too much if you did it in the traditional way. The cool thing is, technology caught up almost in the nick of time, right? So using AI to again, accelerate the workflow of doing audio descriptions is an amazing solution. Like it's, it really does not only produce like a really good product and output, but it meets the spec. And it is, you know, at least 10 times more efficient than doing it manually. Technology and industry kind of like caught up, but we didn't do it until a couple of weeks before the deadline. Right. So, the recent extension of Title II I think is a really good thing because I don't know how the cities were gonna be able to comply with that on the 2026 deadline date. Dana: Yeah. There are a lot of small shops that still need to be in compliance and trying to figure all of these pieces out. Yeah. And talking with a lot of our, our folks here at the show. They are taking this deadline and yeah, there's some relief, but they're all still working very diligently to make sure audio descriptions is in their workflow. And the captioning piece like it, I mean, basically the term paper got pushed out a little further, but it's still due. You still gotta do it right. And, when you implement any workflow change like that, don't wait till the last minute next year. Dana: Yeah. Yeah. Now like, take it as a time to like, For, for your sake and our sake. Please start doing it now. Dana: So we had some really cool new things that we were able to show at this NAB. Yep. Dana: So, MediaScribe. Let's start with MediaScribe. So we have MediaScribe Live as well as MediaScribe Narrate. Yeah. So do you wanna tell folks a little bit about how the awesome things Narrate can do? So, MediaScribe is our video accessibility platform. We kind of divide it into two, two workflows. One is the live workflow that does transcription, translation, and then voice synthesis for those translations during live meetings. That product, we did add speaker identification to so we know, you know, which council members or which people in the meeting are speaking, by name. And we can insert that into the captions, and the interim displays. And then on the other side, Narrate is the audio description part of the platform that allows you to upload any of your media, the AI analyzes where the gaps are. Takes the context of what's happening during, in and around that part of the meeting, using the audio and the visuals. It does visual recognition of the slides, graphics, and the scene, and is able to create a really good description of the visual scene. Then we have a human in the loop process where staff can go, just double check, to make sure the AI did the right thing, said things properly. They can tweak it if they want, export it and it's done. Dana: So it's, it's really interesting 'cause these are cities, they wanna make sure they comply. They wanna make sure that their video content truly does meet accessibility. Are there ways that we can show that compliance piece? Yeah. So, ADA Title II is of course built to serve all the residents in our communities, right? No matter, you know, what their modality is. So, the WCAG, which is the web accessibility guideline defines like, Hey, here's how we need to present digital media, including websites, PDFs, and video. And there's a very specific spec that you need to hit for the video part and the audio description part. What we've done is not only, you know, do we create the audio descriptions, but we create a report that says that the work got done and the result of that work. Because in the spec, if you have a video and there's no gaps in it, no audio breaks in it. Kind of like this podcast, we're just like talking and talking and there's no breaks, the spec says you don't actually have to put audio descriptions in, in that case. Because there's nowhere to put them. That is a compliant video. Dana - Mid Episode Break: Hey, if you're enjoying this podcast, you might also like our webinars. We host live sessions where we dig deeper into topics that matter to media makers and government, like accessibility, compliance, automation, all of it. Join us live to ask questions or browse our on demand library whenever it fits your schedule, click in the link in the show notes to check out what's available. Dana: So I'd be remiss if we didn't mention Cablecast of course, as well. And there is, we introduced an integration with Cablecast and MediaScribe this year. So tell us a little bit about that. What's great about that is, obviously we have tons of customers that run Cablecast to do their their broadcast playback and their online presence. And, the new integration with Media Scribe allows you to just mark one of your shows in Cablecast and, and mark it as, Hey, this needs audio descriptions. It actually sends it up to MediaScribe, MediaScribe does the magic, sends you an email for review, you review it, and Cablecast brings it back down to your automation and it's available for on-air playback or your web delivery. Dana: So it's really important when building an intentional workflow like that. When we have these small shops in these smaller cities, that just don't have that many people. Now I. One click, you say smaller one, but like all of them, like we could, we could all use a little workflow efficiency. Dana: So it does it, it helps it. And it's not just like tacking on accessibility at the end of it. It's, it's more like built in. Built in. Yeah. And you know, that's the, one of the things that we've always tried to do with Cablecast is automate as much as possible. Because, one of my old mentors had this great phrase, he always said, have computers, do what computers do and have people do what people do. He would say that like 30 years ago when I was working at the station, and it's so true, like computers should move files around. People don't need to do that workflow, right? So that's kind of always been the basis of Cablecast is automate all of the stuff that is just moving ones and zeros around and let the humans do the creative part. You know, the scheduling part, the, you know, what are, what are we actually shooting, creating, and bringing out to our residents. As far as information goes, I let the computers do the rest. Dana: And with Cablecast, we had some really cool new features, and some products as well. One of them being the Showcase Events. When I was running a station, always looking for different ways to highlight the really important things going on in the community, like your graduations and things like that. So, how does Showcase Events get us to that in enhanced promotional piece of it? Yeah. You know, a lot of, stations' websites, they have a lot of content, right? And browsing all of that content for the user is sometimes overwhelming, and with showcase events, what it allows us to do is across the internet channels and the OTT apps really highlight that new content. Like you said, the graduation's gonna happen and that's like elevated in the OTT app. So people can tune in easily. Dana: And you can rewind to the beginning of the start of a live stream. Like how cool is that? Like, so you're missing the beginning of the, the city council meeting. But I, you know, saw that the Boy Scouts were getting a, an award and I really wanna see the Boy Scouts get an award. You can rewind to the beginning. How cool. This is, what I actually love about the OTT delivery of stuff is that when it was on the cable channel, you missed it and you missed it. And you had to wait for the rerun. But with the new OTT stuff, you missed it? No problem. Just rewind it a little bit and, and catch up. Dana: Yeah. So I think that's gonna be a game changer with a lot of our customers. We have Cablecast LiveBridge now. Mm-hmm. So this is like the big brother to Cablecast RTMP. And speaking of going live right, Dana: speaking of going live, a lot of customers will have live events and they've gotta gotta get those live events up. And sometimes they run out of encoders. Right? Dana: Yeah. So with no additional hardware, you can now have these simultaneous streams. Yeah. Just going out for when you've got that graduation and you've got the Paws and Puppies parade or whatever it is, and you got 10 showcase events and they all happen all at the same time. Dana: Right. Which happens a lot. So while folks are having all of these awesome programs going out live and there's there a way for them to look at who's watching? Yep. Audience measurement features in Cablecast. Now we're actually tracking sessions so we can get more accurate with like actual eyeballs watching the content. And then, what device, what platform we get more refined on like who's watching and where. Yeah. And on what device and on what channel because, it's important as people that are operating government communication channels, where is our audience and our residents actually watching our content so we can make sure that those channels are really well served. You know, obviously we wanna serve all of the channels that we're going through, but it's good to know which ones are getting the most eyeballs. Dana: It, it also, it's really helpful if folks are looking for sponsorships or they need to, you know, do a report to the city council about you know, their communications plans. It's gonna be able to give 'em those types of metrics. Yep. Absolutely. Dana: So audio side cars. So now we have, we're able to add multiple audio tracks to video on demand. Yeah. How have you seen folks use this? Well, obivously like I was saying before, if you've got MediaScribe Narrate, we use the sidecar feature to slip in the audio description content. But people use it for doing translations, other lang, supporting other languages. What you can do is you can take your content, you can transcribe it and translate it to a variety of languages. Upload those as sidecar files and then you'll be able to like, play back any one of those tracks. Dana: Yeah. No, that's great. And I feel like we have a really robust tool set to help people meet these WCAG guidelines moving forward. Yeah. I would say, for us the big theme, you know, we're talking about the NAB themes for us, probably the past year the theme for us has really been around accessibility, how do we make our tools and the content that all of our customers put out, meet these guidelines and create the most accessible content experience ultimately for the residents. Dana: And just so everybody knows, we do, have a robust training around accessibility. We call it called MediaScribe Academy. Yep. Yeah. If, if what we just talked about was a bunch of word salad and you know, quite like, what are all these acronyms? mediascribe.ai. There's an Academy link. There is a ton of awesome content in there to get you up to speed. Dana: Yeah. So folks, have, you have another year to start, you know, this journey. Don't wait until the eleventh hour again, though. Dana: Don't wait till at the end, start reading up on some, some articles there and feel free to reach out and we can help. Right? So any final words for our listeners and viewers at home? No, I think, I think I talked quite enough. Dana: You did great. So to the viewers and listeners, thanks for tuning into the Government Video Podcast, like share, follow, and we'll see you next time. Thanks.