BOSTON—3Play Media today unveiled Live Professional Captioning, a live captioning solution that offers professional human captioning backed up by auto captioning technology to protect against unexpected problems like loss of internet connectivity.
A recent 3Play Media survey on the state of captioning revealed that 60 percent of respondents caption live video. Nearly half produce up to 1,000 hours of live streaming video every year.
"The need for live captioning has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic, and we're not seeing it slow down,” said Josh Miller, co-CEO and co-founder, 3Play Media. "However, companies have had to choose between live automatic captions, which don't provide the accuracy necessary for accessibility or a quality user experience, and traditional human-produced live captioning, which is historically manual and expensive but provides better accuracy. Our solution is the first to provide the best of both worlds for viewers and publishers—modern, platform-based technology with high accuracy and reliability."
The new platform relies on a trained voice writer and a proprietary web-based tool created by 3Play Media to recognize the trained voice writer’s speech and produce accurate, reliable captions at scale, said company co-CEO and co-founder Chris Antunes.
“When we consider 3Play Media’s proven approach to unsupervised captioner training that requires just a laptop and a microphone, paired with self-service customer event management, we see a solution that redefines live captioning,” said Antunes.
The platform offers an automatic failover that automatically continues the captioning process within seconds if the captioner loses connectivity, internet service or power.
3Play Media’s web-based scheduling interface integrates with video and conferencing platforms, including Brightcove, YouTube and Zoo. It offers RTMP captioning for over 30 different platforms. Users manage all live captioning events from one dashboard, which also displays the status of upcoming and in-progress events, the company said.
The scheduler provides the user with key pre-event information, such as when the event has been matched to a captioner and when the captioner has checked in for an event. During the event, it offers general transparency around stream and caption status. API event scheduling enables users to integrate and manage event scheduling in their business systems.
More information is available on the company’s website.
