The Full Guide of Professional Closed Caption on Brightcove

Brightcove is one of the best video hosting solutions for large businesses and media organizations. With its Cloud Video solution, it delivers your videos across all platforms with the utmost reliability.

But the platform has also designed features to improve the digital accessibility of your videos.
In addition to its video player adapted to keyboard and voice control, it is very easy to add subtitles on the interface.

As a subtitling expert, we reviewed and evaluated the various subtitling options available on Brightcove. We give you the fastest and most professional way to do it. Get ready to save time! :)

Why put closed captions on your Brightcove Cloud video?

Brightcove, with its streaming and delivery technologies and OTT service, is popular with corporations and media organizations with large video projects. The platform has an all-in-one interface that allows you to manage these types of projects from start to finish.

But in addition to all these features, Brightcove has also made a lot of effort with regard to video accessibility criteria, particularly by complying with the standards set by the WCAG.

By subtitling your Brightcove videos, for example, your content can become much more accessible to any audience. Subtitling your videos increases viewing and engagement rates, enabling soundless playback and improving readability.

Here are some key reasons why you should do it too:

• You open up your audience to the diversity of languages and nationalities around the world.
• You make your content accessible to the hearing impaired and people with comprehension problems.
• You increase the user engagement on your videos.
• You provide visual support that encourages users to react or discuss directly with your message.

So there are many benefits to be gained! You are given a step-by-step method to get started.

Captions Brightcove videos: what are the ways to get started?

The first point to make is that Brightcove does not include an automatic captioning solution. That leaves us with only one way to caption your videos: create and upload a VTT file to the platform's dedicated interface. But there are several ways you can make this kind of captioning format:

• By creating it by yourself, from a manual transcription of the audio
• Use of an automatic subtitle generator
• By calling on a subtitling professional

For the first alternative, we warn you, it's a complicated job. Transcription requires a lot of time and very specific skills, which are those of transcription professionals. There are a certain number of rules and even standards to comply to.

Automatic subtitling solutions, on the other hand, make the work easier, but still need additional human optimization and refinement.

That's why we present here our professional subtitling solution Checksub, which combines both an automatic generator and the skills of caption experts.

How do I professionally generate subtitles on Brightcove?

As speech recognition technologies have widespread, there are a growing number of subtitling solutions available on the web. But it's the solutions for professionals that are the most reliable for high-volume, high-demand projects.

We present here our subtitling platform in collaboration with captioning experts (agencies and freelancers). It integrates essential functionalities :

• An advanced speech recognition API
• A collaborative interface with subtitlers and translators to manage your video project
• An automatic translation engine to translate your video, with 128 different languages available.
• A powerful and easy-to-use online subtitle editor

Here is the fastest and easiest way to proceed with our subtitling solution.

1# Upload your Brightcove video to the interface

To get started, register on the Checksub platform. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose from a wide range of languages to perform a translation if necessary.

You have 1 hour of video to test the platform. If this time is not enough time for your first video, you can buy credits at a low price.

The API will then perform the speech recognition and provide you with the result in a few minutes.

2# Check and optimize the result

When the result is ready, click on the language of your video and access the dedicated subtitle editor to check the synchronization.

Here are a few tips to optimize this task:

• Cut your sequences into 2 sentences of equal length. It's often easier to divide your text into sentences. Go to the setting button to "divide my text into sentences".
• Arrange the text sequences at the exact moment the speaker starts speaking. If the speaker is speaking fast, you can try to delete a few words but not the beginning or ending words.
• Always display the characters when the speaker's lips move (important for those who read with their lips).
• Be sure to display a subtitle at the beginning of a scene and erase it at the end of the scene.
• Repeat several readings by yourself to check the fluidity of your subtitles.

3# Retrieve and send the VTT file to Brightcove

When you are satisfied with the transcript, you can download the . By adding it to the Brightcove interface, your subtitles will appear immediately.

Call a professional on the interface

As you've noticed, using Checksub by yourself saves a lot of time, but still requires a lot of effort and rigor. Fortunately, if you don't have a lot of time or if you have a big project, you can contact our subtitling service from our interface. Professional subtitlers and translators will then take care of your video projects. Do not hesitate to ask us for more information!

Brightcove Video Transcripts: What's in it for you?

Before you leave, we have another piece of advice for you. A verbatim report of your online courses is a pedagogical tool available to your students. Think about it, it's a practical solution!

Here are some of the advantages of this method:

• You provide visual support that users can more easily understand and memorize, and that they can quote and share directly.
• You improve the referencing of your site thanks to the transcripts included in the pages
• You can turn your videos directly into notes and blog posts
• You make your content accessible to an audience with comprehension problems.

Here's how to boost the impact of your Brightcove content! We hope it will help you accelerate your video content strategy!