The Challenge

The Pokémon Company International streams three Pokémon: The Series streams per week, and needed a team to manage accessability, closed captions, live streaming and QA for the streams.

Our Solution

Followers of the Pokémon twitch channel are familiar with the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Pokémon: The Series animation streams where the community gathers to reminisce and enjoy a few of hours of classic Pokémon episodes.

Producing a weekly stream like clockwork is a challenge more akin to running a traditional broadcast television station and requires a solid workflow and dedicated production equipment.

Our team deployed redundant playback and encoding systems to ensure that the streams are available wiithout interruptions, and require minimal intervention from the Pokémon team.

One technical challenge is the providing closed captioning (CC) accessability for the stream. Most streaming worfklows rely on live-to-air captioning, which has a number of downsides including higher latency/delay, lower accuracy and increased costs. The animation library already has closed caption sidecar files, but most commercial playout and encoding systems can support burned-in option captions, but don't naively support incuding the CEA 708 closed caption metadata as part of the ingest workflow. We deployed a CEA compliant playout and encoding system that we utilize to enable the pre-recorded sidecar caption files to be included in the stream. We are proud to be helping include all members of the community be able to particpate and enjoy the show.