Ai-Media Technologies Limited has announced that it has successfully renewed its exclusive agreement with major Australian broadcaster Seven Network for an additional five-year term.

Under the five-year renewal agreement, Ai-Media will deliver all captioning across the Seven network at lower costs to Seven, driven by the rollout of the iCap network through the iCap Encode products and the automated Lexi and Smart Lexi SaaS products.

Seven will purchase hardware from Ai-Media and will pay a monthly captioning fee (for an agreed amount of captioning) and a monthly equipment support fee. Seven will continue to benefit from the integrated SubSilo product which fully indexes archived content across the network with “search by caption” functionality available 24 hours after broadcast.

Seven Network director of broadcast operations, Andrew Anderson says: “We have partnered with Ai-Media since 2016 and have ensured that our captioning is the best possible quality for all of our viewers who rely on this important service. Our focus is on tight technical integration between our systems, Ai-Media and our playout operations.

“This renewal, further enhances the ability to deploy accurate automated captions across more content as well as improved media search for Seven’s internal teams by utilising technology from Ai-Media’s recent EEG acquisition.”

Ai-Media co-founder and chief executive, Tony Abrahams, adds: “Since 2016, Ai-Media has been the exclusive provider of captioning services to Seven across all markets. This renewal includes a significant technology uplift delivering improvements in scalability and cost for Seven. Through the pioneering use of our SubSilo product, team members at Seven can now use embedded captioning to search extended video archives.”