Since Australian company Ai-Media bought EEG, there has been a noticible shift in pricing. Instead of charging a hefty purchase price up-front, they now charge ongoing fees whenever possible.
I preferred EEG’s traditional pricing structure when they were a small family-run company.
In 2023, Ai-Media EEG started charging stenographers an hourly fee to use iCap. Initially, Ai-Media was charging $4 – $5 per hour to use iCap.
After a threat of a class action lawsuit from the National Court Reporters (NCRA), Ai-Media lowered the hourly rate that they charge captioners to use iCap to $2/hour.
I feel bad for the live captioners who have to pay this hourly fee to use a service that has always been free.
Live captioners who use iCap bring business to EEG. Most of our captioners gave up dial-up service and switched to iCap. We had to buy EEG’s encoder so that captioners live captioners would work with us.
Ai-Media EEG has the broadcast live captioning market cornered. And their iCap service works well.
The only iCap alternative I know of is the Canadian company Evertz’s Caption Conductor. There are other streaming caption servers, but not broadcast live caption encoders that feed audio to a stenographer and enable the stenographer to connect to the station’s HD-SDI caption encoder to produce 608/708 live closed captions. https://evertz.com/products/Caption_Conductor
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