Friday, October 08, 2010
Breaking: Captions for Web Video Becomes Law Today with President's Signature
With President Obama signature this afternoon, online video content creators will be among those required to provide closed captioning, as part of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessiblity Act.
Captions are valuable for not only the hearing impaired, but transcriptons can make video more useful for discoverablity, watching when listening is not convenient and as a step to translation to other languages.
That said, there will be a burden on content creators to create accurate closed captions. YouTube has made considerable progress. Several companies see a business in speech to text closed captioning -- and the new law will certainly be valuable to them
Recently we covered a new start-up called SpeakerText and have republished our interview with Matt Mireles. We have also covered PlyMedia. Our inteview with Matt Knopf is below. Here is our story on YouTube and automatic voice to text. Daisy interviews Ken Harrentsein. Video is at bottom of page. Another important player is dotSub, here is our report and video below of Michael Smolen.
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Comments
So every web-cammer on YouTube will have to provide CC for their rambling diatribe about Lady Gaga's stance on homosexuality? I'm not a lawyer, but my interpretation is that traditional TV content ported to the Web has to have captioning. Nothing about original web video. Headline = misleading.
@both commenters and article author. Point has been missed.
@ExGeeEye,
The congress wrote this law, meaning you should look in Article I of the Constitution. The relevant parts would be the Commerce and the Elastic clauses, which allow the legislature to pass laws to regulate interstate commerce, e.g. telecoms and Youtube
Idiot.
I've been looking through Article II of the US Constitution, and cannot find where the President has the authority to order people to publish their remarks in any medium they have not chosen for themselves.
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Dear Readers and Authors:
Hallowed All Saints Day
This comment is in the dot the i's and cross the t's domain.
I visited Beet dot TV's
http://www.beet.tv/2010/10/captions-for-web-video-becomes-law-today.html
and appreciated learning about their work.
I think it's all worth doing - and doing well, as I'm sure they do so believe.
If the "t" and "s" were to be transposed in the article, so that "Daisy interviews Ken Harrentsein...." would read
"Daisy interviews Ken Harrenstein. " that would be better.
Before ending on a positive note, IMHO the current swarm of data output by auto-captioning bots is -- without control -- going to result in another wave of information overload, or worse, in 2 entities or domains:
a) spider types and bots and
b) liveware and breathers.
So, if that data, in this case, captioned data, is accurate to begin with, then the a and b entities (above) will get it right the first time.
Postive end note: the note of C or 261.63Hz
Alan