Closed Captioning Services

The Vendor is required to provide live closed captioning and pre- recorded captioning.
- Provide transcription services for council sessions for the county’s government access channel.
- Uses this equipment to close caption regularly scheduled live public hearings, council sessions, committee meetings and other live events on an as needed basis.
- County also close captions prerecorded series programming on a weekly basis (currently on Wednesdays and Fridays) using the encoders listed above and the toll-free lines.
- Provide captions that meet the quality standards embodied in commission rules concerning closed captioning of video programming on television.
- Commission rules for TV closed captioning ensure that viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing have full access to programming, address captioning quality and provide guidance to video programming distributors and programmers.
- The rules apply to all television programming with captions, requiring that captions be:
• Accurate: captions must match the spoken words in the dialogue and fully convey background noises and other sounds possible.
• Synchronous: captions must coincide with their corresponding spoken words and sounds to the greatest extent possible and must be displayed on the screen at a speed that can be read by viewers.
• Complete: captions must fully run from the beginning to the end of the program possible.
• Properly placed: captions should not block other important visual content on the screen, overlap one another or run off the edge of the video screen.
- Asked to make recommendations for the county to purchase software for the successful transcription of the county council sessions and/or additional closed captioning equipment and/or new or updated software for the county that will be owned by the county.
- Provide a dedicated project manager who will be responsible for all aspects of the project to include, but not be limited to:
• Monitoring and performance of all tasks on the project;
• Supervision of all team members working on the project;
• Use of best practices for the industry;
• Creation of and compliance with project schedule;
• Provision and explanation of project status reports;
• Coordination of all required tasks and personnel for entire project;
• Coordination of any necessary equipment, hardware or software acquisition and installation;
• Responding to emergency requests; and
• Completion of all deliverables/milestones.  - These services must be available for normal workdays (8:30 – 6pm Monday – Friday), evenings 7:30pm – 10pm and weekends within 24 hours after receipt of notice.
• Real time closed captioning for regular council sessions, generally held on Tuesday, averaging five hours each, begin at approximately 9 am EST (starting times are subject to change, the time of adjournment is at the discretion of the county council). 
• During a two-three week period in May, the county council will meet every day (Monday – Friday) for approximately 6 hours per session;
• Real time closed captioning for council public hearings and committee sessions.
• These sessions are held generally on Monday, Tuesday (day and evening), Wednesday or Thursday (day and evening) averaging four hours. 
• Transcripts may be requested for the committee sessions and public hearings. 
• Transcripts turn-around time is 48 hours.
• Real time closed captioning for prerecorded programs as they are digitized into the county automated playback system (currently Wednesdays at 8:00 am EST and Fridays at 7:30am EST).
• Real time closed captioning of programs produced in Spanish simultaneously in Spanish and English on Fridays and Wednesdays. (These days are subject to change.).
• Real time closed captioning of programs produced in English simultaneously in English and Spanish.
• Provide a SMI or SAMI closed caption file of each live captioned event.
• The county reserves the right to request that the qualified vendor provide transcription services for council sessions for the county’s government access channel. 
• The resulting accurate corrected transcript in xml file must be able to be used with our video on demand provider.
• Offline closed captioning.
• Internet service captioning for video streaming, web casting, and video on demand
• Multi-language closed captioning and subtitling, including but not limited to Spanish, Amharic, and Chinese and Korean.
• Captioning and transcription services starting the effective date of the resultant contract.
• Customer access to indexed county council sessions over the internet and on demand.
• Customers access to county council sessions based on a set of indexes by topics/agenda item/keyword searches and
• Closed captioned teleconferencing.
• Provide specifications for any necessary equipment needed to provide captioning and transcription services.
• Provide policies, procedures and best practices to insure optimum service.
• Provide the number of captioners who will be assigned to the contract that have the following certifications: certified real-time reporter and certified broadcast captioners.
• Provide consistency in persons captioning, transcribing and editing council sessions to provide a high level of captioning quality.
• Provide engineering support for captioning and transcription services if requested.
• Provide loaner equipment support in the event of failure of county owned equipment.
• Provide a list of new technologies that could assist the county in providing closed captioning services to our viewers.
• The county reserves the right to use other means, such as speech recognition software or other software or hardware solutions, when it deems this necessary to close caption programming.
• Additional closed captioning services as requested by the county.
- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Optional Pre-Bid Conference Date: July 14, 2025
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: July 16, 2025