A microwave plasma generator is provided in which a gas in a vacuum vessel is directly excited by an evanescent wave from a microwave resonator disposed in the vessel without using an ECR system. The ion generator can include a high voltage pulse generator whose output pulses are coupled between first and second electrode arrays. The method also includes, during a single video on demand streaming session, converting the closed captioning data from the first format to a platform-independent format and converting the closed captioning data from the platform-independent format to a second format.