Yale School of Music: Efficiently Captioning Content Backlogs

The Situation

The Yale School of Music created a catalog of videos for many years showcasing profiles of faculty members and students, behind the scenes clips, promotions for upcoming shows, and more. Video is an integral part of the School of Music. So much so, that it creates the second-most content than any other department on campus. The school wanted to make their digital content accessible to people of all abilities so they looked into implementing captioning. Captioning in-house wasn’t an option for the School of Music because they didn’t have the resources to transcribe, create time-codes, and ensure the captions were accurate. They already spend a lot of time and resources dedicated to their video production since all videos are created in-house.

The Approach

The School of Music needed a reliable captioning vendor that could handle its library of content. Although the university already had an account with 3Play, the School of Music still wanted to do their own research. Their entire video archive was hosted on Vimeo. It was extremely beneficial that 3Play had an integration with Vimeo because it saved hours of work uploading and publishing videos to their website. When the caption file was complete, it simply posted back to Vimeo. They needed a captioning vendor to caption newly-produced video content and older content, so that no matter if the viewer wanted to watch an old or new video, they would have the same viewing experience with captions.

The Results

3Play Media helped the Yale School of Music caption all of its backlog and new video content so that it can be accessible to all viewers. They used the integration with Vimeo to streamline the captioning process. The School of Music even liked the option to download different caption file formats for videos posted on other platforms beside Vimeo. They also upload content to Facebook and YouTube, and 3Play enables them to do so seamlessly. The Yale School of Music has found that captioning their video content has not only helped with audience reach, but it also increased video viewing as well.