Brightcove – 3Play Media – Carahsoft Webinar

April 5th, 2011 by Tole Khesin

We recently did a webinar together with Brightcove and Carahsoft, who is the government reseller for both Brightcove and 3Play Media. The webinar centered on integrated workflows between Brightcove and 3Play Media, while also covering the benefits of transcription and captioning. Below is the complete transcript. You can also watch a rerun of this webinar.

ANDREA TERRAZAS: Hello everyone. Carahsoft Technology would like to welcome you to our Brightcove and 3Play Media webcast. Before we get started, I would like to go over a few housekeeping items. All of your lines have been muted to reduce any background noise. And we hope you take full advantage of the chat pod on the left side of your screen to ask any questions throughout the presentation. We will do our best to answer all of your questions at the end of the presentation. If for some reason we do not get to your question, the Brightcove and 3Play Media team at Carahsoft will follow up with you offline.

Carahsoft is a trusted government IT solutions provider delivering software and support solutions to federal, state, and local government agencies. Carahsoft maintains dedicated teams to support sales and marketing for all its vendors, including Brightcove, 3Play Media, Symantec, Adobe, VMware, and Redhat.

Our contact information will be at the end of the presentation. Call or email us at for any– This webcast is being recorded and a copy of the presentation will be emailed to you.

At this time, I would like to introduce our speakers for today. Adam Jacobs, the Brightcove and 3Play Media account representative at Carahsoft. Josh Miller, co-founder of 3Play Media. And we also have Michael Moore, technical director at Brightcove, who will be available for questions and answers at the end of the presentation. Adam, Josh, and Michael, the floor is all yours.

ADAM JACOBS: Thanks Andrea. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adam Jacobs, and I’m the account representative for both Brightcove and 3Play Media at Carahsoft. I started working closely with Brightcove a year ago, and more recently with 3Play Media. And I’m excited to help present to you all today. Very quickly, I wanted to give you an agenda for this webcast. I’ll be presenting a brief introduction to Brightcove, for those on the webcast who are unfamiliar with us. And then an overview of online video on the web to discuss interactive transcripts, search engine opposition, and 508 compliance with online video. Josh, Mike Moore, and I will then take about fifteen minutes to answer any questions that may come up. So let’s go ahead and dive right in.

So Brightcove was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire who some of you may know from his previous work with Cold Fusion. It was founded on the premise that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. And it’s a vision that has largely proven out. And as a result of this, the market opportunity for demand for video related solutions is exploding, as we’ll discuss in a minute.

At its core, Brightcove is an online video platform that helps organizations of all sizes publish video through their websites and syndicated partner sites to desktops and devices worldwide. As an example of what Brightcove can handle, I’ve included some screen shots from the IMF video page. Both of these screens are from the same site, with the same experience, but one is Flash, and one is in HTML5. Brightcove handled all the encoding, so that IMF didn’t have to.

Brightcove has over 2,800 customers, powering over 60,000 sites worldwide, supporting every imaginable vertical and use case. On a daily basis, we average over 150 million player loads, resulting in over 35 million streams delivered. And we ingest over 5 hours of content every 60 seconds. Therefore, we’re second only to YouTube in delivering video on the Internet. And with that brings a tremendous amount of market insight. Insight that we share with you, our customer, allowing you to strengthen your presence on the web, to extend your agency’s message to more people.

I’d like to say that myself and everyone at Brightcove would now be an extension of your online video team, and would like you guys to consider us subject matter experts for everything that is online video. This includes our team of over 100 engineers, who are focused each and every day on developing highly scalable, yet customizable platforms. And our 60+ professionals in post sales support that ensure that every Brightcove customer is well supported and successful.

In areas that I’d like to highlight about the technology that creates multiple renditions of your videos and delivers multi-bit rate streaming. This means that no matter what device your viewers are accessing your videos with, be it a connected HD TV or an Android smartphone, they’re watching a smooth video stream greater than 99% of the time. We also have detailed out-of-the-box analytics to help you measure viewer behavior and gauge the success of your online video. And since this is entirely about the transcription and search engine optimization, 508 support, I’m going to skip over that for a second. But we also provide the background technology you need to deliver quality mobile experience on nearly every device. We handle the complexities of HTML5 versus Flash so that you don’t have to to.

Brightcove customers also can now manage their YouTube content directly from their Brightcove studio, making the management of their content on the web that much easier when it’s all done from one place. And of course we have live event support. Through the integration with Akamai, Brightcove can provide you with all you would need to easily deliver high quality live streams, through your branded players with the ability for live DVR functionality, giving the viewer the ability to pause and rewind live events with our platform.

So with that, I want to share some of our thoughts and insights that demonstrate Brightcove’s unique value proposition. As you can imagine, with our size and scope, we monitor the online video market very closely. And we constantly share our observations and insights with both current and future customers. So here’s an example of this insight. This graphic represents the relative use of traffic on the web over the last 20 years. You can see that video has been exploding in recent years, and is currently over 51%– and that share is still growing. And one of the insights that we’ve been able to garner from this growth, is that video equates to engagement, and engagement drives traffic. And this is a key concept for us. This here is another look at online video growth, just over the last few years. And as you can see, the online video views have more than tripled, from just under 10 billion views per month in 2007 to more than 30 billion views per month in 2010. And we expect it will explode again in 2011. Websites simply cannot afford to ignore the need to have a high quality video environment on their pages with this growth.

Now this chart represents the distribution of online videos on the web. As you can see, with properties, such as Facebook having a growing play in this space. However, almost half of video distributed on the web comes from the rest of the web, including site-specific content. So if an agency is only putting videos up on YouTube for instance, then they’re missing out on a very large number of viewers. Agencies just can’t afford to continue to ignore these trends.

There was a time not too long ago, when putting video on a site was pretty straightforward. But the market has actually significantly changed with the proliferation of mobile devices. The emergence of connected TVs and the explosion of social media as a powerful new medium. For brand management– at which these changes occurred. And finally our customers need to accurately measure their success. And all of this has become complicated very quickly. Take a close look at some of the terms on this slide. If there’s anything on here that you may not be considering and tackling when it comes to your online video solution, I can almost guarantee that there’s going to come a point where your solution will hit a wall. The investment needed to get past that well could potentially be very large and consume a lot of man hours. And by the way, Brightcove’s platform takes care of all of these features. In summary, Brightcove helps agencies eliminate the complexity and drive more business value with video.

So I’m not exactly sure how familiar this group is with the Brightcove platform. So let me provide just a quick overview, to wrap up my portion of this presentation. Brightcove helps you easily upload and manage videos, either manually or programmatically. It can be done by a user in a studio or through automatic processes, via an integrated DAM or CMS systems leveraging our APIs. Next we encode, store, and organize your assets. We help you easily create custom players and playlists, manage live events, metadata, mobile delivery, and leverage analytics, all from our intuitive, easy-to-use console. And from there, we help you easily deliver a high quality video content experience to [INAUDIBLE] or distribution partner. So if you’d like a high level demonstration of this workflow, please reach out to me after the event today. And if you’d like a technical dive into what we can provide, I’d be glad to have one of Brightcove’s engineers walk you through the product at a detailed level. And with that, I’m going to hand things over to Josh Miller. Go ahead, Josh.

JOSH MILLER: Great, thanks Adam. My name is Josh Miller. I’m one of the co-founders. I’m going to give a bit of an overview of captions and interactive transcripts. I’m also going to give a little bit of an overview on the accessibility laws that are in place today. And the benefits of captions and interactive transcripts. I’ll also be providing a guide on how you as the video publisher can add captions and interactive transcripts to your videos, specifically with the Brightcove player and platform, to show how easy it is, that we set up the two systems to work together.

So what are closed captions? Captioning refers to the process of taking an audio track, transcribing the words to text, and synchronizing them with the audio or video. Captions are typically located underneath the video or overlaid on top of the video towards the bottom. In addition to spoken word, captions are supposed to convey all meaning, including all sound effects. This is a key difference from subtitles. Captions originated actually in the early 1980s by an FCC mandate that applied to all broadcast television. Clearly that’s expanded today.

So captioning versus transcription. Transcription is a part of the captioning process. But the differences is that transcripts or not necessarily time synchronized. It’s often just the plain text document. Then captioning versus subtitling, subtitling is a little bit different from captioning in that subtitling assume that the viewer does not have a hearing impediment. Subtitles capture the spoken content, but not sound effects. Typically subtitles will be used to convey pay words in a different language, and it’s possible to create multilingual subtitles. Then closed captions are included in way on the video that allows the viewer to turn them on or off. Open captions, in contrast, are always being shown on the video and cannot be turned off. And finally, post production versus real-time. This has to do with the timing of the process. Post production means that the captioning occurs offline. It’s for on-demand content, and can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete. Whereas real-time captioning is what a lot of people are familiar when it comes to making jokes about captioning on television because it’s all live. It’s actually a court stenographer typing pretty much as fast as possible.

Quick overview of some of the accessibility laws in place right now. So starting with Section 508. That requires federal electronic and information technology to be acceptable to people with disabilities, including employees and the public. For video, this means the captions must be added. For podcasts and audio files, a transcript is often sufficient.

Section 504 entitles people with disabilities to equal access to any program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.

And most recently, the Twenty-First Century Video Communications and Accessibility Act that was signed into law in October expands those caption requirements for all online video that previously aired on television. The easiest example there would be a lot of the Hulu content really should have captions because it aired on television. Expanding legislation to move beyond network television is also being discussed and was part of the bill that was originally put in congress.

So many states have also enacted similar legislation, and often refer in their state legislation to the federal legislation, in place of Section 508 and Section 504.

Very quickly about caption formats. With web video, with there being many different web players, there are also different formats that are used for each video player. This image shows what a typical SRT caption format looks like. It’s basically a time starting and time ending of a particular caption frame and the accompanying text. YouTube actually is one of the big platforms that uses the SRT format. The Brightcove player would take the DFXP format. These are all standard formats that we produce. But it’s just a quick view of how quickly online video can become complex.

Now what are interactive transcripts? These are clearly a little bit newer to online video. So here are some of the basic characteristics of what is an interactive transcript. Unlike closed captions, there is more of a transcript being played and it’s often, or always, outside the video image. The text is precisely synchronized with the media and it’s actually actionable. We’ll talk more about that.

So how are captions and interactive transcripts used? Both interactive transcripts and captions can be displayed in many different ways. We’ve actually built are interactive transcripts to be quite flexible in the way they’re implemented. So they can be below or next to the player. We’re going to take a quick look at some actual websites right now, just to show you a couple of examples.

–And to help boost inbound traffic in search engine optimization is the ability to share clips. So if I highlight an interesting portion here, you get the option down at the bottom to create a clip. And when– –this exact portion of the video.

Another example is with the MIT Infinite History site. Again you’ll see the Brightcove player on top and the interactive transcript below. One interesting piece here, we’ve implemented what we call archive search here on the right. So it lets you search across what are in this case a 100 different videos by keyword. So if I type in the word technology, I can search all 100 interviews, and I could see visually where and hits are for that word. That’s also another plugin that can be used leveraging these time synchronized transcripts and the Brightcove, especially the Brightcove integration that we have. I’m going to switch back to the slides now.

So real quick about some of the benefits of interactive transcripts and captions. With interactive transcripts, obviously you have a little bit more ability to do search and others user actions for quick navigation through a video. It’s an interesting– so instead of saying, hey take a look at this video, it gets really interesting at the six minute mark, you can actually point someone to that exact point. Text is also a really key component of improving the SEO performance of your videos. Transcripts are an accessibility solution for hearing impaired viewers and for people in noisy environments, which is something to consider as well.

And finally, transcripts are the first requirement to translating content into other languages for broader audiences.

I wanted to quickly talk a little bit about search engine optimization and just some basic best practices for video. Here are just a couple point, and there are definitely other things to consider as well. Videos search engine optimization is all about making it easier for your videos to be found on websites. For sites like Google to actually identify pages and videos at that have the search terms that have been entered. So here are some basic principles. One thing that we like to consider beyond basic search engine optimization is the overall optimization of video itself. So are you making it more engaging and more likely for someone to want to share that link or that video with their followers. It’s really important, but a little bit outside of just traditional SEO, but it’s really something that should be considered.

We’re going to walk a little bit through an overview of the steps involved and how to publish captions and interactive transcripts. Getting an account set up is very quick. Some things to keep in mind about our account system is that it’s very secure and you can set permission levels if you want to have multiple users within one account. We aim to make workflows really as unobtrusive as possible. We’ve built an integrated workflow for Brightcove users to try to make that as easy as possible. So using the Brightcove API, you can actually view all of the videos that you’ve already uploaded into your Brightcove account from your 3Play Media account. So all you have to do is press a button to start processing a file for a transcript or caption. Also when this happens, we ingest the metadata and video ID information that is in the Brightcove platform. So that we can associate all that data with the transcript file as well to make the overall integration of the different tools much, much easier down the road.

Once the transcript and captions are created, really all you have to do is add the caption plugin to the player that you’re going to publish in your Brightcove account. And then you have to add a little bit of code to the web page. For interactive transcripts, we actually have a plugin builder within the account. So you can configure the interactive transcript however you like. So you can select various parameters, such a whether you enable the clipping feature, transcript downloading, whether it collapses or not. You can also pick from different skins. Then update the settings, and you get the code that you would then include when you embed the Brightcove player on your web page. You can also have access to a many different transcript and caption formats. So if you’re using some of Brightcove features to automatically publish to YouTube, for example, you could also put captions on your YouTube files. Also if you are going to be doing [INAUDIBLE] features, there are places where you’d want to use a plain text transcript. And we can walk you through that. So there are examples where you’d actually want to you more formats that we provide.

We’re going to give you a little bit of background about the company as well, now that we have gone through captions and transcripts and how it relates to Brightcove. But just so you have a little more idea of who we are. The inspiration for 3Play Media started when we were doing some work at the spoken language lab at CSAIL, which is the computer science department at MIT. We were approached by MIT OpenCourseWare with the idea of applying speech recognition for a cost-effective solution. We quickly recognized that speech recognition alone certainly would not suffice. But it did provide a starting point. From there we developed an innovative transcription process that uses both technology and humans to yield high quality transcripts with time synchronization. We’re constantly developing new products and ways to use this time and text data that lives together, largely with the input from our customers. Our focus is generally transcription and captions, but we also do other services, such as transcript alignment, if you already have a transcript. And we’re now doing translation into other languages. And when we do translation, all the tools, and in this case, subtitles and transcripts, are also able to use the translated formats.

But certainly accuracy and quality is something that’s always a concern, and something that we really put a lot of time into as well. With regard to speech recognition, we have a multi-step process that delivers very high accuracy, even in cases of poor audio quality, or multiple speakers, or difficult content.

All of our work is done by professionally trained transcriptionists here in the United States. We’ve done a lot of work on the operational side of the business, which is making it possible to match the transcriptionists’ expertise with certain types of content. That results in a much higher quality product. One example would be if we get math lectures or tax training tutorials, it makes a lot more sense to have someone who has experience with either math or a financial background to be working on those files.

So everything transcriptionist goes through a rigorous training program before they touch any file. I’m actually going to show you quick peek into that. This is a little bit more of an idea of how we manage quality. We have a rigorous training program. It covers everything from basic grammar to mathematical content to how to deal with the fact that we just speak differently from how we write. And sometimes we will change course and mid sentence.

Along the same lines, we want to make sure that the customer has the power to make corrections when necessary as well. Sometimes a name is misspelled or it’s just difficult to know how to properly spell a proper noun. We give you the tools to go in and make a change, save that change, as well as play that media back from an exact point. So you can review everything and do everything very quickly. You don’t have to reprocess anything, and plus all of the time synchronization is updated automatically to account for the changes.

While we built a number of tools that are somewhat self service and automated, a lot of what we’re doing is based on the fact that we give our customers a lot of attention, and really value their feedback. We enjoy building the relationships. We expect to build the relationships. One of the things we really like working with Brightcove is that we have a great relationship with them and we can constantly build new ways to make the two systems work well together.

We included several URLs here before we taking some questions. You’ll see some resources, a get started link, as well as some video tutorials. We’ve included links to both our video tutorial as well as Brightcove’s training videos. Both of those are using Brightcove players with interactive transcripts. So you can get a sense for what that looks like very quickly as well as links that we shared before. If you want to take a look at what those are looking like in production, Please feel free to do so. So with that, I will turn it back over to Andrea and Adam and bring Mike into the mix, and we’ll answer some questions.

ANDREA TERRAZAS: Thanks Josh. Once again everyone, you can submit your questions using the chat pod on the left side of your screen. Well give them a few moments as they come through.

JOSH MILLER: As we’re pulling from these questions, the first one that we can knock out is pricing. I can comment on the captioning and transcription. We basically price it on the volume of the content itself. So everything is based on the length of recorded content per recorded hour. And basically prorate accordingly. And we prorate even down to the nearest second.

ADAM JACOBS: I see Robin asking, can your product work on presentations such as this or just published video? Well the way that we’re actually going to be delivering the recorded demonstration here is we’re going to actually put this into a Brightcove player with 3Play Media. A full transcription from 3Play Media available to everyone to take a look at once the recording is ready. So it is definitely possible to create transcriptions for things such as this.

JOSH MILLER: There’s also a question about the plugin pricing of the archive search and additional costs. We have a free tier and it takes quite a bit of effort to get up to a paid tier, actually. Usually we try to make it pretty simple. Unless you have really tremendous traffic or more customized needs, which is totally reasonable, and we’re happy to work with, but unless you need some customization, we try to make it free. There are certain situations where there is a small monthly fee. One thing we should mention also is that everything is web-based on our end. And the interactive transcript and archive search. Those are all running– for those who are more technical– running over our API and connecting to the Brightcove APIs. So nothing has to be installed. It’s just adding some code to the pages that you’re publishing on. And if you need it to be hosted on premises that’s something that can be discussed as well. Usually we would host the transcript, and it’s all done very– it’s a very quick installation.

ADAM JACOBS: On the Brightcove end, it’s a cloud-based application or software as a service. There’s nothing that needs to be installed on your end. So it’s all delivered via the cloud.

MIKE MOORE: Just to add to that, Adam. This is Mike from Brightcove. It’s actually a very simple configuration set up on the Brightcove side. And essentially all you’re doing is pointing to those transcription files for whatever given player that you’re doing the transcription for.

JOSH MILLER: There are a couple of questions about security. We’ve built in a number of security measures on our end for transcription. Everything is delivered over SSL encryption and things like that. When it comes to transmitting the captions, it’s over an API. If it’s done with the standard method. But there are ways that they can be transmitted to another server and then served up within a firewall. So that security can be really maintained very, very carefully. And I know that Brightcove has built in quite a bit of security features as well.

MIKE MOORE: I see a question here on recording live video. Yeah, that’s not a problem for Brightcove. We actually have a relationship with Akamai that allows us to record a line as they’re taking place. And then once that recording is made available then you could certainly that like any other on demand asset and do a transcription of that for 3Play – the same as you would for any other on demand.

JOSH MILLER: There’s a good question about HTML5 support with captions and transcripts. The interactive transcripts are using a JavaScript widget on the outside of the player. So those are a little bit more friendly for HTML5. But with captions, because it is a Flash-based plugin right now, we’re speaking with some folks at Brightcove to make that– support. Unfortunately nobody really out there has figured out a phenomenal solution for any video platform quite yet. But we’re definitely working closely with Brightcove to address that as well.

MIKE MOORE: There is a question here, how do I install the plug in? That’s very easy to do in the player. You can do that through a markup language that we provide. It’s a very simple one-line addition that essentially points to an external SWF file that processes DFXP file provided by 3Play.

ADAM JACOBS: I think we’ll probably give a minute to allow maybe a few more people who might be thinking of some questions to ask to ask them. For the most part, if your question wasn’t answered, I’d be happy to follow up with you offline and either answer that question for you or provide you with someone who can answer the question. Again my name is Adam Jacobs and my contact information will be presented at the end of this webcast.

MIKE MOORE: There’s a question on the external SWF file. The external SWF file that’s external to the Brightcove player is actually provided by Brightcove. And it interacts with the player. Through that SWF file is how you essentially point to the DFXP file that is provided by 3Play.

ANDREA TERRAZAS: All right. Thank you so much. If all of you could please take a moment to answer the polling questions current displayed on your screen. It would be greatly appreciated. I want to thank all our participants as well as Adam, Josh, and Michael for being with us today. We hope this webcast has been helpful for you and your organization. If you have any further questions or would like to request more information, feel free to contact the Brightcove and 3Play Media team at Carahsoft. Our contact information will be displayed on your screen in just a moment. So please don’t hesitate to call or email us. Thanks again and have a great day.

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How to Add Closed Captions to Your Kaltura Video Player

March 1st, 2011 by Tole Khesin

This blog article is obsolete
The Kaltura integration has been updated. Follow the link below for step-by-step instructions on how to create and publish captions, subtitles, or an interactive transcript with Kaltura.

See the updated documentation for Kaltura captions, subtitles, or an interactive transcript

kaltura logo

Overview

This blog article provides step-by-step instructions on how to create and publish captions or subtitles for Kaltura. The integration between Kaltura and 3Play Media allows you to transfer your media files directly from your Kaltura account to 3Play Media for processing. Captions files can then be uploaded to your Kaltura account and published through a caption-enabled Kaltura player.

Kaltura closed captions or subtitles

Step 1 – Import Your Kaltura Media Files into 3Play Media

1. Log into your 3Play Media account at http://account.3playmedia.com.
2. Navigate to Upload > Import from linked accounts. Select Kaltura and enter your Kaltura login and password.
3. Click the Process Video button for all media files that need to be imported. Metadata for the file, such as title and Video ID, will be imported as well. Videos that have already been processed will show a status of Imported.

Step 2 – Download Your Captions File

1. From your 3Play Media account, navigate to My Files. Click the Download link beside the file to be captioned and select SRT.

2. Unzip the file after it downloads.

Kaltura closed captions or subtitles

Step 3 – Upload Your Captions File to Kaltura

1. Log into your Kaltura account. Select the Content tab and click on the name of the file to be captioned.

2. Select the Captions tab on the left.

3. Click the + Upload File link and upload the SRT file that you downloaded in Step 2.

Kaltura closed captions or subtitles

Step 4 – Configure a Caption-Enabled Kaltura Player

1. Select the Studio tab and create a new player.

2. Select the Features tab on the left and then the Subtitles and Transcripts dropdown.

3. Choose how you want the captions to appear, by enabling one of these two check boxes (only select one):

  • Captions on Video to overlay captions on top of the video
  • Captions for Accessibility to display the captions underneath the video

Kaltura closed captions or subtitles

4. Publish the file as you normally would. Select the Content tab and click Preview & Embed under the Publish column.

For complete details download the Kaltura Get Started Guide.


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How to Add Closed Captions and Subtitles to Your Mediasite Presentations

January 13th, 2011 by Tole Khesin

mediasite logo

Overview

3Play Media has a complete captioning integration with Mediasite. You can submit captioning requests from within Mediasite for individual presentations or an entire folder of presentations. 3Play Media automatically receives and processes your presentations, and then posts the captions back to your Mediasite account. You can monitor the status of your captioning projects from within Mediasite or your 3Play Media account. For complete details download the Mediasite Get Started Guide.

mediasite integration

Step 1 – Link Your 3Play Media Account with Mediasite

1. Log into your 3Play Media account at http://account.3playmedia.com and navigate to My Files > Upload Files. In the bottom right corner of the screen, find FTP Settings and take note of your 3Play Media username and password. These are the credentials you will need in order to communicate with the Mediasite system. Note that these are not the same credentials used to log into your 3Play Media account.

2. Log into your Mediasite account and navigate to Presentations > Captioning > Manage Provider Profiles > Add Provider Profile and specify the settings.

mediasite integration

Step 2 – Set up a Captioning Project

1. Log into your Mediasite account and navigate to Presentations > Captioning > Add Captioning Project and specify the project settings.

mediasite integration

2. Navigate to and select individual presentations or a folder of presentations. Optionally, you can update the default view settings to see hidden presentations.

3. Click Save.


Tracking the Status of Your Files & Projects

The Mediasite system provides the status of files and projects currently being captioned. You can also obtain status information by logging into your 3Play Media account.

mediasite integration

Starting and Stopping a Project

If you selected the manual start option for a project, you must start the project to begin the captioning process. Also, when you automate the captioning process for an entire folder, the captioning service will poll the folder at the interval specified and when new presentations are detected, will upload them to the captioning service. In some instances, you may want to stop a project temporarily and restart it at a later time.

To start or stop a project navigate to Presentations > Captioning and select your project in list and click the Start Project or Stop Project button.

Additional Resources

For complete details download the Mediasite Get Started Guide.

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President Obama signs Accessibility Bill for Increased Web Video Captioning

October 8th, 2010 by Josh Miller

This afternoon, President Obama is expected to sign the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.  The new law, originally introduced by Rep. Ed Markey as H.R. 3101, will mandate further captioning requirements for video online.  This is a very exciting step forward for the millions of Americans who are hearing impaired.

The legislation initially applies to any video content that originally aired as television programming.  As web video continues to grow, the push for expanded regulation will likely grow louder.  While the benefits of transcripts and captions are significant, regulation of such applications is a delicate matter.  For more of our thoughts, please read a recent post of ours on the new Accessibility Act.

What do you think?  Is this the beginning of more legislation to come?

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How to Convert Caption File Formats

September 12th, 2010 by Tole Khesin

There are many different types of caption file formats and sometimes you need to convert from one type to another. For example, let’s say you download a captions file from YouTube (SBV format) and want to use it to encode to video for iPhone, iPad, iPod, or iTunes. To do that you’ll need to convert it to the SCC for iOS format. If you want to use it with a Flash player you’ll probably need the DFXP format. And with a Windows Media Player you’ll need the SMI format. It seems that every application requires a different format, but it’s surprisingly difficult to convert between them. To address this problem, we created a free web tool that converts between all the major caption formats, including SRT, SBV, Flash DFXP, SCC for iOS, SMI or SAMI, CPT.XML, QT, and STL.

The Caption Format Converter works instantly. Just paste your SRT or SBV file, and seconds later your selected output format will be emailed to you in an attachment that preserves the correct formatting. You can use this free service as much as you want. Let us know if you have any feedback or if there is anything else we can do to be helpful.

caption format converter

Below is a description of the major caption file formats:

SRT – This is the most common subtitle/caption file format. It is a text format that originated in the DVD-ripping software SubRip and stands for “SubRip Subtitle” file.

SBV – This is a YouTube caption file format that stands for “SubViewer.” It’s what you get when you download captions from YouTube. It’s a text format that is very similar to SRT.

DFXP – This is a common format used for captioning Flash video. It’s a timed-text format that was developed by W3C and stands for “Distribution Format Exchange Profile”.

SCC for iOS –Popular standard used for encoding closed captions for iTunes, iPods, iPads, and iPhones. It was originally developed by Sonic and stands for “Scenarist Closed Caption.”

SMI or SAMI – Used for Windows Media video or audio. It was developed by Microsoft and stands for “Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange.”

CPT.XML – XML format used for encoding captions into Flash video. It originated in the caption-embedding software Captionate.

QT – Caption format used for QuickTime video or audio. It was developed by Apple.

RT – RealText captions for RealMedia video or audio.

STL – Used for DVD Studio Pro. It was developed by Spruce Technologies and known as “Spruce Subtitle File.”



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ReelSEO interview on web video accessibility and captioning

August 18th, 2010 by Josh Miller

I was recently interviewed by Grant Crowell of ReelSEO on the passing of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.  We discussed the implications of the new regulation as well as some of the added benefits of transcribing and captioning web video, such as SEO and improved navigation.  I’ve included the audio and interactive transcript from the interview here:


Click on any word to jump to that part of the audio


JM: The act is a big step forward for video accessibility on the Internet. The act essentially replicates a lot of the existing accessibility standards that we see on television every day, which really requires networks and television shows to caption their programming for those who need the assistance, for the hearing impaired.

It’s also actually a big tool if you’re ever in the airport. Most times you can’t hear what’s being said on the television. And the closed captioning actually comes in handy quite a bit.

What happened is that they have passed a bill that basically forces any programming that had been on television previously, that will be aired on the Internet to also carry captions with it for the hearing impaired.

GC: My understanding in the blog post that you wrote was that the two bills– There were two bills here that I understand were passed that are going to expand the requirement for web video captioning accessibility services.

Specifically one, they’ll require that any captioned television program be captioned when delivered over the Internet. And two, they will also require all devices large enough for video to be equipped to support captioning functionality. Can you explain a little bit more of what we can expect then from that?

JM: I think what you’ll see is a lot more of– NBC, CBS, Hulu– the big video sites that carry a lot of the programming that has already aired on television, some of them were already offering captions, but a lot of them really weren’t.

And even those that were, were a little bit inconsistent at times. And what’s happening now is that they’re basically going to be forced to offer captions.

Personally, if the captions are already created, I would think that this shouldn’t be such a horrible task to undertake. It’s more reformatting an existing transcript that hopefully has been preserved in some way. So what it’s really doing is, it’s a pretty logical step I think in a lot of people’s opinions.

And then the part with the devices, that’s where it gets a little interesting. And now we’re seeing all kinds of new capabilities with smartphones, Droid, iPhone, BlackBerry, that are really much more video capable than ever before. Of course the iPad.

They’re basically extending the legislation to those devices since people are now consuming video more regularly on the more capable devices. And for a long time that was a little bit more difficult.

But now a lot of the video platforms that support web captioning, or even web video in the first place, are now supporting mobile capabilities as well. So it makes sense that they’d be asked to do the same thing there.

GC: Now Josh, I can definitely understand with shows like on NBC that go over to Hulu and the benefit in them having the means to do closed captioning for the Internet.

My question is, does this affect also television shows on the local level? Just say your typical regular morning talk show or something independently produced but that does appear on network or cable. Will the requirements be the same for that?

JM: Yeah, as far as I understand, the networks that are local or the programming that’s local will also have to caption their content if it’s put online.

I think the big difference between what does or does not have to be captioned is really where it initially airs. So if it’s an Internet TV show or if it’s specifically created for the Internet, those shows will not be mandated to have captions.

GC: What about 24-hour shows like CNN, Home Shopping Network, do they already something like this in place that you know of, or are they going to have to follow the same requirements?

JM: Their requirements actually are a little bit different. The standards for live programming are slightly different right now.

I don’t know all of the details, but I do know that the standards that they’re held to are a little bit lower because of the live nature. The expense to have perfect captions on a live show is quite high. So a lot of times, certainly news shows since a lot of them are scripted, they’ll actually feed the script in for the captions.

GC: Now in terms of the arguments for and against, I know in your blog you mentioned Representative Ed Markey was the initial sponsor who introduced the bill. Are you familiar with the organizations that had originally basically lobbied for this bill?

JM: A number of the organizations that lobbied for it are really around the accessibility function. So there’s COAT, which is really big on accessibility all over the place. And it goes far beyond captions really.

GC: That’s the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology at coataccess.org I believe.

JM: Exactly. The big thing around video in addition to captions, for the hearing impaired clearly captions are critical, or transcripts. The other side of it is, if you’re blind, video is nice in that you have audio. But even then, the true accessibility when it comes to web accessibility would offer the ability to have a screen reader go through a website and actually read aloud what’s on the website to the person. It’s some pretty cool technology that will do that.

The problem with video is that can’t always be done. It can’t be navigated quite as easily. So you need the transcript for those purposes as well. So there’s a lot more than just captioning behind pushing the effort. Really the accessibility groups were a big part of this. Certainly National Association for the Deaf, the NAD, was a big part of it.

The interesting thing in my opinion with the Internet is that captioning and transcription of video offers a lot more value than it could on television. And there is a search component for video in just the nature of the Internet where there’s so much information out there and so much video now that there’s a huge, huge, huge benefit that can be gathered from having captions and transcripts. And I think that’s one of the best parts of having all these networks be forced to caption their shows. We’re now going to be able to search them, which is pretty cool.

GC: There’s a lot of good arguments for having closed captioning on video, just from an ROI standpoint rather than even just through legislation, although I’m sure that gives it a good boost. Were there any organizations or individuals that you know of that actually came out against this legislation?

JM: I don’t know about specific organizations or people, but there are actually good arguments for why this would be difficult to pass or why you might want to limit what’s actually mandated.

And one of those is actually the whole thing, coming back to the Internet-only shows. If you start mandating things like that where one of the beauties of the Internet is it’s actually quite inexpensive to produce content and post it and share it, if all of a sudden those people are now forced to caption or transcribe their content, the cost is far higher than they initially started out at and they may actually be dissuaded from creating the content. Which is completely not the point of this.

So I think that was one of the big arguments, as well as even how do you regulate this. There’s so much content out there and it’s far more infinite than television, that regulation of this becomes a big issue as well.

So there definitely are reasons why it’s difficult to make this more of a sweeping bill. Even the legislation that exists for government entities in section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or section 504, is difficult to enforce. So section 508 says the any federal content, any federal content, on any site has to be accessible. It’s pretty cut and dry. But even that is difficult to enforce, and those are for federal entities.

That became a big part of this. And then there’s a huge grey area of what is television-type programming and what’s not. So the Internet actually, as wonderful it is in bringing all this content to us, actually makes it difficult as well to figure out where can we draw the line and who really should be captioning their content.

GC: That also brings up another interesting question. What are the solutions available right now for people who can do closed captioning?

I know most people might use YouTube’s own closed captioning features. They have one where you can upload a transcript. And they have another area where it does it’s best for audio recognition, you can go in and edit.

I’ve done both. It’s a very handy feature for people who are just looking for a free service out there, even though I would say for your audio recognition you better make darn sure that you’re in an enclosed area and the sound is really good, otherwise you can get some very strange stuff.

But perhaps you can share with our audience what are the solutions out there for people. There’s audio to text recognition. And there’s what your company does which I believe is– There’s other ones that do just really fast manual transcriptions, I guess along a certain area of using technology but having a human being behind to edit and review the stuff.

So can you explain a little bit more about what people can do right now in the area of closed captioning with the solutions that you guys offer?

JM: I think what Google has done is fantastic. They brought a feature, a tool, to the public for free that people can use whether they have a transcript or not. The great part is if you do have the transcript they’ll align it for you for free. It’s going to be at least good enough, if not better, which is great.

And then if you don’t have a transcript you can actually automatically generate one. It’s actually the same technology as Google Voice for anyone who’s used that. It’s basically their speech recognition that they’re actually making some pretty good strides with. It’s not going to be perfect, and they admit that too. But it’s better than nothing. It’s something there.

The other part that comes into play is you could actually run your video through Google’s tool and create a draft transcript and try to edit that. And you can kind of play around with what might be faster; starting from scratch or running it through and editing.

Other free options, there’s a site called subtitlehorse.org where you can actually have an interface that allows you to type in your captions and arrange your captions in caption frames, so that’s a nice tool.

But there are also certainly lots of firms out there. There are a few firms that are really focused on web captioning, web video and transcription, like ourselves. Then there are plenty of really experienced captioning firms who do all the captioning for broadcast.

So WGBH which is a big part of NAD, The National Association of the Deaf, as well as Colorado Caption, and the list goes on.

GC: There are a lot of opportunities for people. And I think it does come down to testing out what’s available. I’ve started with the free, but clearly if you’re doing a lot, it probably does make very good sense to be working with a company, at least maybe a combination of a technology tool and human editor behind that stuff. Probably especially one that might have an understanding of your own industry because the vernacular can certainly change depending on what industry you’re in.

My last question to you Josh is, where do you see this going in the future with congress? I know it was mentioned it was a bit of a watered-down bill from what could’ve been taking place with online video.

If you had to look into your crystal ball, do you think that future bills will be introduced that will go farther with mandating captions in Internet video viewing?

JM: I do. And I don’t say that as something that I get excited about because of the business we’re in, but more because of the way the Internet’s going.

So much more communication now, certainly in the enterprise, but even in education and all over, is being conducted with video.

Classes are going online. People stopped traveling for meetings because they’re doing video conference calls or there are webinars, webcasts, everything. If you look online, video is just through the roof.

And the whole point of the ADA, The Americans with Disabilities Act, in the first place was to grant equal access for all in these types of situations. And I think, hopefully, hopefully, a lot of businesses will see the benefit before they’re being told they have to do it because there are a lot more benefits with the Internet. And there’s just a lot more you can do with that transcript.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if it came down to the point where something had to be mandated more explicitly, just to make sure that no one was being left out.

GC: For the businesses and people that do already seen the benefit– I guess this is my last question. It’s an appropriate way to do it– what do you recommend people and businesses look for in choosing a closed-captioning service? And what’s the criteria that applies pretty much to anyone?

JM: I think back to what you said before is, number one is volume. And if it’s really low volume, you’re just doing a couple files, then I think it is worth exploring some of the free options.

If it’s larger volume, that’s something to really pay attention to and understanding that the firm that you’re dealing with can really scale and meet your needs. So that’s one thing.

I think quality is huge, and there’s a huge variance in quality. And I think that the consumer of transcription and captioning services needs to decide how much that matters. If quality matters, you will notice it. And if it doesn’t, then I would find a solution that just works for you and that the price is right.

That’s the last thing, price is always going to come into play, unfortunately, but that’s the reality of the situation. And pricing can also swing quite a bit.

I will say, to your point before, there’s always going to be some industry vernacular or specialized vocabulary when you’re dealing with specific industries or academics or whatever it may be. And so in that case, I think you might want to pay a little more attention to quality and understand where the people are sourcing their labor, what the process is, and how much they build in quality mechanisms.

Those are things that are worth asking about and really making sure you know what you’re getting for your money. Because there are a lot of offers out there that are incredibly cost effective. And some are more realistic than others when it comes to getting a quality product.

GC: I would definitely add to that, that could fall under quality is efficiency. How nice it would be for someone like myself, do a show and have it already transcribed for you.

Even though, of course good people use a transcript and start from there, but when you can have everything out there like you mentioned, more text that’s more indexable for search, both on site but also throughout Google and other areas.

So it does make sense from an accessibility standpoint but also from marketability standpoint.

Josh, I’d like to thank you for educating our audience about this bill and about captioning and web video captioning for Legal Video Guys. Thanks for being a part of this. JM: Thank you, appreciate it. It was a good time.

What are your thoughts on how this legislation will affect online video publishers? Is this all we should expect in terms of mandates, or are we just getting started?

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Breaking down the latest regulation for online video accessibility

August 6th, 2010 by Josh Miller

Today, the US Senate unanimously passed the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (S. 3304) with only slight modifications to the version passed in the House.  Last week, on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (H.R. 3101), a watered-down version of the bill introduced by Representative Ed Markey (MA), with a convincing vote of 348 to 23.  The original Act led to the existing FCC regulation that requires most television programming to provide closed captions for the hearing impaired.  Any mandate that requires sweeping changes takes time to implement and enforce; and broadcast captioning was not fully enforced until 2006.

Captions provide a critical means of consuming video content for the 36 million people in the U.S. who are deaf or hard of hearing.  Captions also offer a method to watch the television in environments in which the sound cannot be used.

The two bills that have been passed will expand the requirement for web video captioning and accessibility services.  Specifically, they will require that any captioned television program be captioned when delivered over the internet; a completely reasonable requirement.  They also require all devices large enough for video to be equipped to support captioning functionality.

This news comes as a big step forward for accessibility.  However, the requirements have been significantly reduced from the initial version of the bill introduced in the House.  An emotional, yet accurate description of the exclusions in the new version of the bill can be found on CaptionAction2.  The original bill introduced earlier in the current House term called for all “television-type” programming distributed over the internet to be captioned.  In other words, any professional content created solely for internet distribution would also have to be captioned, not including user-generated content as seen on YouTube.  While a bit vague in what would have been included, it is clear that the mandate for captions would have been far more widespread than the simplified bills that got passed.

Nonetheless, this new legislation is a huge step forward for accessibility.  Even though the new law will be limited in scope, the far-reaching and open nature of the internet provides other means of pushing the cause forward.  It would be no surprise to think that the new bills passed got an extra boost in momentum when the internet’s largest online video platform, YouTube, became vocal about the need for and benefits of video captions.  And they’ve really walked the walk by launching a plethora of tools, including captions and interactive transcripts, to add to and support the corresponding video.

Captions have a far greater potential benefit to internet users than to television viewers.  The Internet is driven by text.  Since videos cannot be read, indexed, or navigated efficiently without the text equivalent, time-synchronized transcripts not only provide a worthwhile accessibility benefit, but they also have additional value that only the internet could unlock.  For starters, text provides a means for search – of the SEO variety and within a large archive.

The internet is all about distributing information, and then navigating it.  That means people all over the world are watching videos posted here in the U.S.  Captions provide a fantastic tool for ESL students or anyone trying to use video to improve their English.  Captions and transcripts also provide the most efficient means for translation to other languages.  With so much communication taking place in video form over the internet, such as webinars, webcasts and video conferences, accessibility solutions of all kinds are in high demand.

H.R. 3101 and S. 3304 may not have dramatically changed the legal requirements for online video, but they are a significant step forward.  Congratulations to all those who fought so hard to make this legislation happen!

So what do you think?  Is legislation necessary, or will organizations determine that transcription and captioning of web content has a worthwhile ROI regardless of any mandate?

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Visit booth 608 at the Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

August 4th, 2010 by Josh Miller

3Play Media will be exhibiting its captions and interactive transcripts at the Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin this week.  This year’s conference, entitled “Innovation in Distance Education” will be held at Monona Terrace at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, August 4-6.  In addition to the exhibit hall, workshops, demonstrations, information sessions, and panel discussions will be taking place throughout the three day conference.  Attending will be representatives from higher education institutions, PK-12 education, business and industry, government, and healthcare.

Educational technology has rapidly evolved over the last several years to include online learning modules, webcasts of live and recorded lectures, and course management tools.  For example, a single university course for a semester can produce 30-40 hours of video content; multiply that over many courses, semesters, and institutions, and there is a real need for the accessibility and navigation benefits that transcription and captioning provide for web video.  With the recent passing of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (H.R. 3101) in the US House of Representatives, we expect transcription and captioning services for web video to be of particular interest at the conference.

Come visit us at booth 608!

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Google brings buzz to captions like never before

November 23rd, 2009 by Josh Miller

Just the other day Google announced its intentions to automatically generate closed caption files on a select group of YouTube files.  The story quickly made it to the NY Times and all over the blogosphere, as it rightfully should.  The idea is to eventually rollout the capability across YouTube for all users to test.  With 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, that’s a lot of text being created!

At its core, this is a brilliant move by Google to improve YouTube search (and advertising) capabilities.  But Google’s announcement, largely because it’s Google, also puts the accessibility issue in front of the entire country for a change.  Captions are mandated for much of television, but they are only beginning to get some attention on the internet, well until now.  Representative Ed Markey, the same Congressman who made the original push for closed captioning on television, introduced H.R. 3101, the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009, during this session of Congress, and it currently has 19 co-sponsors.  This is actually the second attempt at getting a bill passed that would mandate an improved user experience for the hearing impaired.

Thanks to one of the most talked about technology companies of our time, closed captioning is getting attention all over the internet.  Anyone who works with online video is now paying attention to closed captioning.  Not only are we empowering the hearing impaired, but in a virtual world that seems to be driven by search and discovery, video can now be made more “accessible” than ever.

So for a business that is centered on providing high quality, time synchronized transcripts, what does this announcement mean?

Well, it could mean a lot of things.  First, let’s look into this new Google service.  Google will deploy the same technology that powers Google Voice across YouTube to enable the creation of text.  This means they will be using automatic speech recognition (ASR) to create the caption files.  Using ASR on audio and video is not a new concept, but it’s new at this scale.  We’ve commented on our experiences with ASR capbilities in the past.  In fact, we’ve even played with the very engine that will be front and center for the YouTube initiative.

We’ve spoken with many people who have tested ASR solutions.  Usually, if they are talking to us, they weren’t satisfied!  The truth of the matter is that ASR will be good enough for some people, and it won’t be good enough for others.  80% accuracy (at its best and in studio quality recording conditions) leaves a lot to be desired.  In fact, Google even admits that results can be somewhat amusing when they’re off.  On the search front, the most critical keywords tend to be the most unique and, therefore, least common to be recognized accurately.  Google’s announcement does not change that, it just makes an ASR solution easier to use and free to consume.  In many cases, Google has likely provided a medium for people who may never have put captions on their video with the ability to do so with very little effort.  Google has also made the search benefits of captions glaringly obvious.

Ultimately, the organizations that require (or believe in) high quality output for captions and search will be willing to pay for cleaned up text.  There are significant benefits to the high-quality approach, whether it be accurate search results or truly legible transcripts.  Branding is also a critical issue for many organizations who add a text component to their video offering.

We at 3Play Media will continue building high quality solutions that make multimedia more accessible for everyone.  More people than ever are aware of the benefits of captions and time-synchronized transcripts now.  We have some new product launches on the way that will build off these very benefits, and we can’t wait to show the world how their online video experience can be changed forever.

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Accessibility Act is Back At Bat

July 15th, 2009 by Josh Miller

We’re excited to say that Ed Markey (MA) is at it again.  Our local Representative has re-introduced the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 3101).  The previous version died in the House due to a lack of co-sponsorship and little time to build support within that particular session of Congress.  The new bill has about a year and a half (January, 2011) to gain enough support and get passed in this session of Congress.

More importantly, what would the new bill actually change for the growing digital world?  The legislation aims to ensure that people with hearing or vision disabilities are given access to video programming and IP-based communications.  For video programming, this means video players will not only be required to support captioning functionality, but most content will also be required to offer captions and text aids.  The National Association of the Deaf’s (NAD) press release gives a good outline of what is actually required:

  • Requires closed captioning display capability in all video programming devices.
  • Extends closed captioning obligations to television-type video programming distributed over the Internet (not user-generated content).
  • Requires easy access to closed captions via remote control and on-screen menus, and requires easy access by blind people to television controls and program selection menus.
  • Restores video description rules and requires access to televised emergency programming for people who are blind or have low vision.

Basically, someone making a homemade video and uploading it to YouTube (user-generated content) would not be required to put captions on their video (although YouTube does support it).  Pretty much any other professionally produced content would require captions or text equivalents.

In the case of network programming re-purposed for web consumption, it seems reasonable to require content that already had captions to once again be available with captions online.  Then there is the reality of the digital media world of today.  More and more educational institutions, large corporations, and even help desks are utilizing video to teach and and instruct their pupils.  But if there are no captions, those with hearing impediments are completely left behind.  The Caption Action 2 blog gives a pretty clear example of what it’s like to sit in class and watch a video that you can’t hear or even understand.  The blog also references some of the applicable comments left on the NAD’s blog, highlighting more personal experiences.

In a recent interview Jenifer Simpson, senior director of government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), also noted that captions go beyond aids for the hearing impaired.  She notes that people initially complain about the cost of implementation, but ultimately once captions are available, they are enjoyed by many in healthclubs and noisy environments.  Similarly on the web, there are significant increases in retention and learning of video content that has text aids.  Plus, for users who don’t speak English as their native language, captions can go a long way to improve their comprehension of a video.  That’s where we come in – we’re making the caption implementation process more user friendly, more cost-effective, and we’re even adding value for those who may not directly benefit from captions.

The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 is the logical next step for digital media regulation.  Compared to the overall expenditure on video production, text supplements are a minimal expense and can add significant value for site’s user experience as well as for society.

Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 3101

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