Captioning is a really hot topic right now so I thought I’d share one of my short videos from the“Bruce’s Shorts” series of Broadcast-IT training videos for today’s blog post:

Click PLAY to watch the video, or you can read the transcript below.

Hello and welcome to Bruce’s Shorts. My name’s Bruce Devlin, I’m the Chief Technology Officer at AmberFin. And today, we’re going to ask why is captioning so difficult?

Well, it’s an interesting question. Mostly because in some places in the world you are not legally obliged to broadcast video, you are not legally obliged to broadcast audio, but you are legally obliged to put captions on it.

This is a bit weird. It’s OK to go black and silent as long as there are captions.

And actually, that’s symptomatic of one of the things about captioning and subtitling across the world. Very often the captions and subtitles have been legislated. Which means there’s no direct revenue involved for the content owner or the broadcaster inputting the captions on. But, you have to have them there.

Also around Europe, where there are many, many languages, there’s lots of little cottage industries that have grown up to do subtitling. So there’s no real industrialization that’s taken place in that area. Likewise, in the US, captioning has never really been industrialized.

But now, in this modern file based world, we’re looking at delivering content to more and more platforms. SD, HD, internet, iPad, Catch Up TV, On Demand, Blu-ray, ultraviolet, you name it there’s lots of different captioning formats required out there to service all of these different delivery devices.

However, there isn’t a lot more money for making the captions. So if you want to get your captioning right, and you want to help with the difficulty of getting captions into your solution, then look for the one stop shop that allows you to sort captions out within the heart of your ingest and transcode and QC solutions. Because if you can find a way of doing that, you stand a much better chance of controlling your captioning costs.

My name’s Bruce Devlin. That was one of Bruce’s Shorts. I hope to see you for the rest of the series.