YouTube adds Closed Captioning

Via Tech Crunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/youtube-adds-closed-captioning/

YouTube has turned on the ability to add full closed captions to videos. This will not only allow videos to appeal more directly to foreign audiences, but will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting ads to them. After all, a complete set of subtitles is the same as a transcript of the video. And you can upload subtitles for as many languages as you want. It’s excellent data. From the YouTube blog:

You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the “Captions and Subtitles” menu on the editing page. To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language. There are over 120 languages to choose from and you can add any title you want for each caption. If a video includes captions, you can activate them by clicking the menu button located on the bottom right of the video player. Clicking this button will also allow viewers to choose which captions they want to see.

Here’s a Japanimation video with the closed captions (cartoon nudity alert). They can be turned on and off by clicking on the “CC” button that pops up at the bottom right. More info here.

Share this article
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • email
  • Live
  • TwitThis
  • Twitter
This entry was posted in 2. New Media Trends and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>