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INDIAN RIVER COUNTY, FLORIDA <br />MEMORANDUM <br />TO: Jason E. Brown, County Administrator <br />THROUGH: <br />Kristin Daniels, Budget Director <br />FROM: <br />Basil Dancy, Computer Services Manager <br />SUBJECT: <br />Closed Captioning Equipment <br />DATE: <br />December 4, 2018 <br />DESCRIPTION AND CONDITIONS <br />The Indian River County Board of County Commissioners, in an effort to increase the services <br />offered to all of the citizens of the county, has begun an initiative to procure closed captioning <br />equipment to offer this service to the hearing impaired. The IT staff has reached out to several <br />of the surrounding counties and municipalities to investigate what equipment/services are in <br />use. We have found multiple methods in use. <br />Some municipalities are using a closed captioning service where an audio feed is provided to <br />a closed captioning provider and a technician transcribes what is heard into readable text <br />which is then reinserted into the video feed with an encoding device. Others use a speech <br />recognition server that does the transcription which is then reinserted using an encoding <br />device. Through our investigation, both methods produce a comparable level of accuracy in <br />the 95% range. <br />The closed captioning provider service ranges from $140/hour and up for live video and <br />$240/hour and up for prerecorded/archive videos. The speech recognition server solution <br />comes in at a cost of $43,600 for the live video set and $63,250 for the archive video set which <br />can act as a standby/backup device for the live feed when not in use for the conversion of the <br />archive video. <br />The video recordings for the 2017 calendar year (including subsidiary boards and committees) <br />totaled slightly over 175 hours, which, with just the live service cost would add up to $24,500 <br />annually. The annual archive of historical videos averages 150+ hours of video per year at a <br />cost of $36,000+ per year of archive conversion cost for a total proposed cost of $432,000. We <br />currently have 12 years of archive video available. Due to the estimated expenses of <br />captioning live video and the quantity of archive videos, staff believes the speech recognition <br />server solution is the best option. <br />The selected equipment comes with an initial year of warranty/support. Beyond that time <br />frame there would be an ongoing support cost of $12,000/year to be budgeted. <br />151 <br />