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All right, welcome, and thank you for attending this webinar on captioning. My name is Josh Miller. I’ll be presenting with my colleague, Tole Khesin. We have about 30 minutes to cover the basics of captioning today. We’re going to try to make the presentation actually just about 10 or 15 minutes, and leave the rest of the time for questions. Please feel free to ask questions at any point along the way. The best way to do that is by typing them into the window in the bottom right corner of your control panel. We’ll keep track of them, and address all questions at the end of the presentation. Certainly feel free to call or email us, as well. Our contact info is here on this first slide, and we’ll put it up again later on. So today we’re going to give you an overview of closed captioning for web video. We’ll talk about some of the services we provide as well. And go over the process and workflow step by step. So first, let’s start with the basics, what are closed captions? Captioning refers to the process of taking an audio or video track and transcribing it to text. Then it gets synchronized with the media, so that the text can show up at the proper time of the video image or the audio being spoken. Captions are typically located on the bottom portion of the video, on top, or right below the video screen. In addition to spoken word, captions will convey all meaning and include sound effects as well. So this is a key difference from subtitles, which really are meant more for different languages. Closed captions originated in the early 1980s by an FCC mandate that applied to broadcast television. Now, that online video is rapidly becoming the dominant medium, captioning laws and practices are clearly proliferating all across web video now also. So some basic terminology, captioning versus transcription. A transcript is usually just a text document, without any time information. On the other hand, captions are time synchronized with the media content. You can make captions from a transcript by breaking up the text into smaller segments, which are usually called caption frames, and then synchronizing them with the media, so that each caption frame is displayed at the right time. Captioning versus subtitling, as we mentioned already that there is a difference. The main difference here is that captions are really intended for viewers who have the hearing impairment, at least that’s the original intention for them. Whereas subtitles are not about the hearing impairment, it’s much more about language barrier. So they can hear the sound effects that are happening that are relevant, it’s much more about what’s being spoken needing to be translated. And then there’s closed captioning versus open captioning. More often than not, you hear people refer to closed captioning. The biggest difference here is that closed captioning can actually be turned on and off, so it’s as if you’re closing the captions. Whereas open captions are burned into the video, and are always displayed. And then post-production versus real-time, really has to do with the way the captions are produced in conjunction with when the content is aired. So real-time is for captioning for live events. While post-production is commonly done for any content that’s already been recorded. And the captions can be done after the fact. There are differences in process, and differences in price and quality as well with all of these. So, although captions originated with broadcast television, nowadays captions are being applied across many different types of media. Especially as people become more aware of the benefits, and as laws become increasingly more stringent, they’re really being used in different ways. And since every video player on the web and software application handles captions a little bit differently, we’ve actually been working on a number of how-to guides that we post on our website. You can find those on our resources page. So I’ll talk a little bit about some of the accessibility laws that apply today. Section 508 is a fairly broad law that requires all federal electronic and information technology to be accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and the public. For video, this means that captions pretty much have to be added all the time. Any podcasts or audio files where there’s no video image, in that case, a transcript would actually suffice. Section 504 entitles people with disabilities to equal access to any program or activity that receives federal subsidy. Web-based communications for educational institutions and government agencies are all covered by this as well. And I should say that Section 504 and 508 are both parts of the Rehabilitation Act. More recently, the 21st Century Video Communications & Accessibility Act was signed into law. This was actually within the last year, and that expands closed caption requirements for all online video that previously aired on television. So this expanding legislation really goes well beyond the original network television laws. And the laws for online video beyond television content are already being discussed. So many states have actually enacted similar legislation to some of what you see here, largely based on these laws. But these are all federally driven laws. We’ll talk a little bit about some of the benefits. So, the original purpose of closed captions was to provide accommodations for the millions of people who have hearing impairments. But people started using captions for many different reasons with web video. And there are many benefits beyond accessibility, just because of the power of the internet and what else can be done. So one thing that we found quite a bit is that captions improve comprehension and remove language barriers for people who know English as a second language. This is incredibly important for training material or educational material, where really understanding what’s being discussed or taught is critical. And so giving people another way to consume that content can be extremely powerful. Captions also compensate for poor audio quality or noisy background, so you can allow the media to be used in sound sensitive environments as well, like a workplace. A lot of times people will want to, or need to, watch a video during working hours, but it would be inappropriate to have the volume blaring in the office. For search engine optimization it’s also a big benefit, because now you’ve got the text that goes alongside the spoken content, that can be indexed by search engines, since search engines can’t actually get inside the video and pull what’s being said out. The search engines can only index text content. So this is a huge benefit there. And then, once your video has been found, captions allow it to be searched and reused. So this is especially important with long form video. So, for example, if you’re looking for something within a one hour lecture, you can actually search within the text instead of having to watch the whole thing. And then jump to an exact point in the video, based on the segments that you are actually looking for. And we’ve built a number of interactive tools to take advantage of this synchronized text, as well. We can talk about that, and we do talk about that in a separate webinar and can certainly point you to more information, if you reach out to us. And then finally, I should mention that the English captions and transcripts are precursors to subtitles and translation. So getting an accurate transcript and an accurate caption file allow you to turn that into other languages, to reach broader audiences. So there are a number of different caption formats that are used for different web video players. The image here shows a typical SRT caption file. There are three different caption frames being shown with time data and then the text of what’s being said. And you’ll see that each frame has a start time and end time. And this is pretty standard for this format. And this is a commonly used format for a number of video players, including YouTube. So once a caption file is created, it needs to be associated with the corresponding video. And, again, that will depend on the video player itself, just how it can be published. So for YouTube, in this case, you would actually just upload it to your video page and it can associate the file for you. In other cases, there are things that need to be done, like encoding the video file, or pointing to the video file. And, again, I mentioned that we’ve put together a number of how-to guides. Those are some great resources, depending on the video player you’re using. Another thing I should mention is, we’ve built a number of video platform integrations and lecture capture integrations. So if you’re using a lecture capture system like a Mediasite, or an online video platform like Brightcove, or Kaltura or Ooyala, we’ve built integrations with many of them, so that the process is much easier, and the files can be associated more automatically. So we’ll talk a little bit about who we are, as a company. And give you a little bit of insight into the process itself for captioning. So the inspiration for 3Play Media started when one of our founders was doing some work in the Spoken Language Lab at MIT. We were approached by MIT OpenCourseWare, with the idea of applying speech technology to captioning for a more cost effective solution. We quickly realized that speech recognition alone was not sufficient, but it did provide a valuable starting point. So from there, we developed an innovative transcription process that uses both technology and humans to deliver captions that are more than 99% accurate, but priced very competitively. And I should say, while we do use speech recognition, we actually do view that as a big tool– we’ll talk a little bit about that– but we’re really in the business of optimizing the human component to that, and making sure that you’re getting a very high quality caption file and transcript in a much more efficient way. So a little bit more about what it is we offer. Our focus is that premium quality transcription and captioning service. We also do a number of different things, such as automating the workflows and the integrations with other platforms that I mentioned. We’ve built a number of interactive tools for video search, and some of the processes that I mentioned, where you can use the caption and transcript information to actually hone in on a very specific segment that you’re looking for. We’ve also been working with a number of translation companies to start bringing that into the tools we offer, so that you can have multiple languages with your video. So we use a multi-step review process, I mentioned. Part of it is using speech recognition and then we clean that up very, very efficiently. All of our staff is based here in the United States. And we’ve done a number of things to build-in quality, so that you’re actually getting a higher quality output than most manual transcriptions providers. And part of that is because the person who’s cleaning up that transcript is actually more of an editor than a transcriber from scratch, so that they can actually think about the context of what’s going on in the video, and getting the words correct. One thing we’ve found is that no matter how hard we try, there are just going to be certain proper nouns, or vocabulary, or acronyms that are really difficult to get right every single time. So we’ve built an interface for the customer to actually make changes very, very quickly, rather than having to reprocess anything. So, if the name is misspelled, or you want to make redactions even, you can make those changes on the fly in your account, and all of those changes will immediately propagate to any of your caption files. So if it’s automatically being posted back to your video player, it will do that. Or, if you just need to redownload the file, you redownload it and the changes are there. So there’s no need to ever reprocess anything. We’ve built a number of tools to make this process as easy and as self-service as possible. That’s something that we really care a lot about is making that workflow as unobtrusive as possible. And we really owe a lot of our success as a company to our approach to customer service. We give our customers a lot of personal attention, even though it is kind of a hands-off process in many regards. And, if you read our testimonials, or speak to our references, you’ll see that’s it’s a pretty consistent theme. And the reality is that all of the product development that we’re doing, and the workflow integrations, everything that we are doing is because of customer requests. So we take your feedback and any kind of request very seriously, and find ways to work that into our process. So real quick on just what it’s like to actually use our system. The account set up is a pretty quick process. And everything can be pretty flexible in terms of payment as well, it can be done by credit card or invoices. We know that people just have different needs in terms of the financial side of it. It’s a secure, web-based system. You don’t have to download any software. And you can have multiple users per account as well. So when you upload files, there are a number of different ways to do that. It can be done through one of our platform integration partners. It can be done with a secure uploader on the web. It can be done through FTP. And we also have a pretty flexible API. So you could give us links that are direct links to the asset. We really try to make it as flexible as possible, depending on how you have the file stored. So once the file is uploaded to us, we transcribe it and then we actually make it available into a number of different formats. So what you’ll see here is all of the standard formats that we would create. So there are transcript formats, there are synchronized transcript formats, and there are caption formats, that are all included with any file that we process. And we keep these indefinitely. So if you wanted to download a different version later on, say you have your videos on a Brightcove player on your website, and you want to put it on YouTube as well, you’d get the caption formats for both very easily. And there’s no time restriction as to when you actually download them. We’re including a few links here. There are some video tutorials on our site that talk more about our account system and some of the tools we offer, as well as the interactive search and navigation tools. The link to our resources page, that I mentioned, where you can find some of those how-to guides on how to publish captions with different types of players– So, for example, there are instructions on using the integrated solution with Mediasite, where you actually don’t have to do any publishing. Or there are instructions on how to use a QuickTime player or Camtasia. There are a number of different video players, that all have slightly different ways of adding captions to them for for when you publish them to your site. So it can be pretty helpful resource. And those are, of course, free and you can read them any time. So we’re going to take a couple minutes. If you have questions, now’s a great time to ask them. And certainly our contact information is here, so feel free to reach out. So if you do have questions, please type them into the question window. And we’ll be back in about a minute to start answering them. All right, we’re going to start answering some questions. And before we jump in too deep, I should mention that this entire webinar will be archived and captioned on our website. So definitely check back in the next couple days, and that will be published. There is a question about turnaround time for anything we do. Our standard turnaround is four business days. And that includes the transcripts and the captions. We also have options for one and two day service, which would be for a slightly extra fee. And we’re working with some customers who have pretty regular production schedules, so that we can even do shorter than one day turnaround in certain situations. There’s a question about the SMIL format for captioning. Basically a SMIL file, S-M-I-L, is a file that is really a pointer file. It references both the video and the caption file to connect them when you are publishing captions with web video. This is being used less and less with most video players, but it is still around for some video players. We don’t tend to produce the SMIL file itself, but we do produce caption files that a SMIL file can reference pretty easily. So if there are more detailed questions about that, I just encourage you to reach out to us directly. A question about audio quality and how that can affect pricing, and turnaround, and things like that. Basically, with audio quality we can account for a number of different things when it comes to the audio quality, such as accents, things like that. And part of that is because we do have a human involved, we’re able to account for a number of the things that a machine definitely will not be able to account for on it’s own. At the same time, if you’re listening to an audio file and having a hard time hearing it, there’s not a whole lot more we can do. So I should say that there’s not a whole lot of mystery there, that we can’t really pull better audio out to transcribe. So we really do need to be able to hear it, hopefully as well as possible. And the reality is that, the better the audio quality the better the outcome. So there’ll be less confusion as to what’s being said, and we’ll make sure you’re able to get a very, very high quality output from that. We do have a difficult audio surcharge, where the audio is extremely difficult, but could be transcribed. And it’s really just because it clearly would take quite a bit more effort to do that, but it’s pretty rare that we have to apply that. So the question, do public universities have to comply with Section 504, or 508? And what is the right way to do that? Are captions or transcripts, which one is it? It really depends on the content. So, if it’s video content, captions or what we offer, called interactive transcripts, either one would be sufficient. But basically synchronized text, so that the person viewing it really can understand, in context, what’s being said is critical. So captions would be the simplest version of being compliant. Transcripts are absolutely fine when there’s no visual image, because there’s less context around what’s being said to have to follow. So if it’s purely audio, a transcript is just fine. There’s a question about storing the caption files, and kind of what the timeline is, and if you were to receive a certain caption file format one day, could you get another file format down the road? The answer is absolutely. That’s exactly what it’s for. We recognize people will change the way they’re hosting their videos over time, or even want to publish it in different places. So the idea is that, yes, you could download one format today, and then six months from now, a year from now, download a completely different format. And the process would be exactly the same, you wouldn’t have to upload your video again, it would be there for you. And you wouldn’t have to pay, you’ve already paid for it, so you wouldn’t have to pay anything extra for another format, at all. So a question about using Kaltura and using SRT caption files with other platforms, such as Vimeo. So Kaltura, we also have an integration with, and that works really nicely. We have an instruction set of how to use that integration. And Kaltura is an example of a platform that uses the SRT caption format. But when you use a different platform, that uses a different caption format, you would have to use it– it’s a different process to publish, even though you’ve already published once with Kaltura. That’s fine, that doesn’t make a big difference in terms of working with us, you can do both very easily. But a platform like Vimeo actually doesn’t support closed captions at all. I should mention that we are in the development stages of a separate plug-in that will work with platforms like Vimeo, even Kaltura, for that matter, if you want to use a different caption publishing process. So the idea would be that you can use a tool from us to add captions to a Vimeo file, which would be really nice, because Vimeo is not supporting captions right now. Question about how much video we can actually transcribe in a day. So we’ve built this process to be extremely scalable. And that’s part of the unique quality that we offer here. Because we are using speech recognition and designed a really interesting process about efficiently editing that, we also have a number of processes to bring in people into that system, our staff, to work on these files. And we do it in a way that’s very closed, and monitored carefully, so they get trained on our software. But all that can be done very, very efficiently, so that we can actually add more people, and therefore scale up our capacity quite quickly. So we’ve actually processed over 100 hours in a day, in a single day, several times. And that’s something that we can do without changing what we’re doing right now. With advanced notice, we can do even more than that. So that was without any kind of advanced planning. So this is a very scalable process for work to get done. There’s a question about also working with in-house transcribers. The transcribers that we staff are spread out all over the United States, and so some people are working from home. But it’s all done over a secure system, so they’re never downloading any content or anything like that. They log in to the system, do the work, and then, once they’ve finished the work, they actually can’t access the file ever again. So it’s done in a very secure way, but it’s all spread out across the country. This is a question about the cost for transcribing an hour of content with clean audio. Our standard rate for one hour is $150 per recorded hour. That includes all of the transcripts, all of the caption files, all the synchronized transcripts as well. And that rate is actually pro-rated to the exact duration of any file. So if it’s one hour, $150. If it’s two minutes, it’s $5. So there’s no minimum per file. It’s all based on the amount of content you have. So there’s a question about the technical nature of some content. That’s actually something– because of the way we’ve designed our system to be really focused on quality and training all of our staff very carefully, we can actually handle pretty technical content without much of a problem at all. In fact, that’s how we got started, with a lot of MIT content that was extremely technical in nature. So we continue to do a lot of that with a lot of our higher education customers. We do a lot of math content, so the topics usually aren’t a challenge for us. At the same time, we can also incorporate different vocabulary and keywords into our process, so that we can do everything we can to make sure that the quality is as high as possible. There’s a question about Timed-text Format, and the answer is, yes, we absolutely can support that for HTML 5. That’s not a problem. We pretty much can produce any synchronized text format. If we don’t already do it, we can find a way to do it. And that’s because the core output we create is a document that has a time code for every single word, and then we can translate that into other formats. There’s a question about some of the search capabilities we offer. And if you go to our website, with www.3playmedia.com/interactive/archive-search, you’ll see some of our more advanced search functionality. There are two plug-ins to video players that we offer, one’s an interactive transcript, and the other is this archive search tool that will allow you to search down the exact spoken word, and then jump to that part of the file. With the archive search you’re actually able to search across many videos, and then jump to an exact portion, based on your search results. So whether that be five videos, or 200 videos, or 1,000 videos, you can actually get your search results to show where your term appears, and then jump to that exact point. If you’d like to talk about that in more detail, please reach out us, we’d be happy to walk you through what can be done. One thing I should mention also is that, there’s a couple questions here about workflow and publishing caption files. We’re going to be doing a webinar soon with some people from Penn State, [? LE ?] media. they’ve built a really interesting automated workflow process for people on campus to use our system without actually even having to log in, so that it’s all using our API. We’re going to do a webinar with them soon. And they’re going to describe how they built that process, and how it’s been a big success for the university. So keep an eye out for that, we’ll be sending an email out. That should be a really good way to learn more about some of the more customized, automated, workflow opportunities. Some people have asked about the publishing process, in regards to hosting a video. We don’t actually host the video. We do need the video to transcribe the content, but what we’re creating are simply caption files, or the transcripts that are separate from the video. So we’re doing that on purpose, so that we’re not disrupting some of the video publishing activities you already have going on. Instead, we’re just putting another layer on top of what you already have. So there’s a question about auto-tagging content. What we really do is focus on the transcript itself, and the time synchronization of it, so we don’t necessarily add any tags to that transcript. If there’s something specific in mind, I ask you to reach out to us, and discuss what it is you’re trying to do. And we can talk about whether that’s something that we can help with. There’s a question about synchronizing existing transcripts, for either search purposes or captions. As of right now, that’s not actually a service that we offer. Because our process is pretty unique in the way it works, we transcribe and synchronize in the same process. So we don’t have a way to feed the workflow existing transcripts. But we can use them as reference points for the editing process. So that’s something we might offer down the road, that is, the syncing of existing text, but, as of right now, that’s not something we’re able to do. There’s a question about working with subtitle companies. We do have relationships with a couple of translation subtitle companies. And, depending on what it is you need, more than likely we can help you get that accomplished for your subtitles. One company has capabilities going actually well beyond subtitles, pretty much any translation need you might have. And another company that is purely focused on web videos. We have a question about the API, which is a great question. So we have a number of pretty flexible API capabilities, whether it be sending us files to process, or pulling files out, even the interactive tools are all based on our API. And we have a bunch of documentation on it, so if you are interested in going through some of the capabilities, please reach out to us. We can send that to you. But pretty much all of the workflow can be relatively automated, using our API. And, on that note, we can pretty much support any media format, whether it be audio or video, we can actually support over 200 different media formats. So more often than not, we can work with what you have. There’s a question about YouTube videos, and initiating batches. And so I’m actually going to split this into two question. One is we can absolutely handle batch uploads, whether it be over API, or over any upload mechanism. We can also take lists of links. So if you have a direct link to your video on a server, or YouTube links, if it’s the direct YouTube link, with the video ID in there, we can take a list of links and pull the video out that way. So you can actually very, very quickly initiate the process, without having to sit there and wait for an upload to occur. This is a question about live web streams. Unfortunate we do not offer any live captioning at this time. We really only work with pre-recorded content. And then, continuing on the YouTube subject. We do quite a bit of captioning for YouTube content. A number of our customers publish to YouTube, and we can produce the YouTube format very easily. It’s something we do ourselves with some of our own videos, that’s no problem at all. So there’s a question about file naming conventions. Basically, when a file comes in to us, the output file is going to be named exactly the same way as the file in our system. You can also change the name of the file in our system at any time. And the output file will match that. And basically, the extension of that file, whether it be an SRT file or a plain text document, will match accordingly. So you have the ability to make changes and track things. There’s the ability to organize files into folders in the account system, all that can be controlled by you. So, a great question about user access in the account. So we’ve set it so that you can have multiple levels of access. So you can have an admin level or a non-admin level very easily. So that people can have access to the account, upload files, edit files, download files, but not have access to some of the more sensitive domain information. All of that can be self-controlled, you can manage all of your users yourself. And you can also change their access level at any point as well. So all of that is absolutely possible. We can also do things like setting up multiple projects within one account, so that all the billing goes to one place, but content gets siloed off from each other, different projects are siloed off from each other. So that people who have access to one project won’t have access to another. So we just wanted to thank everyone for your questions and your time today. I really appreciate it. Please feel free to reach out to us with any other questions. If we didn’t answer your question, please feel free to reach out. We are going to wrap this up. And we will be posting an archive version of it within the next couple of days on our site, so please feel free to come back and check that out. And, again, thank you very much.
