While a lot has been said and written about captioning and translating for pre-recorded video aka video-on-demand (VOD), there is considerably less information out there about doing the same for Live streaming video. In fact, there are just a handful of companies that provide captions for live streams. The reason for this is that live streams can be significantly more difficult to work with, especially when needing to generate real-time automated captions and translations.
Redefining Accessibility & Inclusivity for Live Streaming with SyncWords
In today's digital landscape, introducing a simple and scalable way to add captions and translations to live streams is just a necessity. By leveraging cutting-edge AI technologies and proprietary algorithms, SyncWords offers a one-stop solution for accessibility and inclusivity with support for the most common live streaming protocols like HLS, RTMP(S), and SRT. This grounded approach ensures that regardless of the streaming platform or protocol being used, SyncWords can meet your live captioning and translation needs.
Whether you're already using the AWS Elemental ecosystem or just exploring the best ways to stream live captioned and translated video content, SyncWords has you covered. Using AWS Elemental MediaLive and MediaPackage for HLS workflows, SyncWords provides a scalable, hassle-free, fully cloud-based approach to captioning and translation.
Additionally, SyncWords x AWS API-supported integration allows you to streamline the process further, ensuring effortless automation and management of captioning and translations, even concurrent live programs.
Key Takeaways
Just like with VOD, there are many benefits to captioning and translating Live video, and we shall cover the main benefits in this article.
1. Accessibility: Closed captioning enables deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to consume live video content in real-time. When content is captioned these once marginalized individuals can more easily access live video meetings and streams. The great news is that with recent advancements in technology, closed captioning can be delivered in almost any language, thus serving the hundreds of million individuals with hearing disabilities world-wide.
2. Compliance: Live broadcasts have been subject to accessibility regulations in the US and Canada ( WCAG 2.1, Section 508, ADA, CVAA & FCC, BILL 96) for a long time. Similar regulations existed in Europe and Asia, but were not necessarily followed by all live video content providers. However, new legislation in the EU makes it difficult for providers to continue to ignore these accessibility requirements..
These requirements can be fairly complex and costly to implement for live-streaming providers. The whole process can get much simpler and less expensive when leveraging generative and conversational AI technologies to automate live captioning and translations. So, AI-powered captions, subtitles & voice translations can not only help you comply with accessibility standards and guidelines but also provide an inclusive viewing experience for all audiences on a budget.
3. Audience Engagement: Sounds like the ultimate goal for all live-streaming providers that is not so easy to achieve. It's where real-time captioning and language translations come in handy. Whether supporting live streams with automated live subtitles or audio translations (also known as AI voice dubbing), you facilitate comprehension of your video content, thus amplifying viewer retention rates and fostering overall engagement.
Additionally, by introducing live captioning and translation features, live streamers can cater to a broader range of viewer needs, like watching video content without sound in public places or environments.
In parallel, offering easy access to live translations and captions from the video player menu enhances interaction with your live programming. Viewers can customize their live captioning and translation experience themselves.
4. Global Reach: For organizations that plan to reach audiences in new regions and demographics the language barrier can be a challenge. Translating video streams in real-time to different target languages can easily remove this barrier. This enables brands to have an international presence and foster cross-cultural exchanges, disseminate product information and much more. Live translations can be done via live subtitles and live voice translations. While this has been challenging to do in live streams, the problem has been recently solved with SyncWords, so all live streamers can now avail of these features.
5. Monetization: Making live video streaming monetizable is a key goal for many content producers. Tangible or direct monetization can be in the form of larger advertising revenues, increased product sales and more subscribers. Clearly, translating to more languages, will enable content producers to promote live events or live shows to larger audiences , resulting in increased traffic, audience engagement, leading to higher monetization.
6. Enhanced Brand Image: Captioning and translating live events is a clear sign that a content producer cares about their audience and community, and demonstrating commitment to inclusivity and accessibility by being culturally sensitive and globally aware.
7. Improved Communication: We believe that inclusion is essential to communication, and breaking language barriers is key to addressing inclusion in communication, so audience members can participate and collaborate seamlessly. This has several use cases including town hall meetings, sales presentations, and global meetings such as at the United Nations.
8. Cultural Relevance: Tailoring language to meet the cultural needs of participants is key in establishing strong collaboration and effective communication. This includes catering to speech in different dialects. For example, languages such as English, Spanish and Arabic can be spoken in various dialects from different countries or regions. Serving the appropriate language in the relevant dialect can be culturally relevant to the audience.
9. SEO Benefits: Captioning and localizing live video content in multiple languages can greatly enhance discoverability of your content, resulting in increased organic traffic to the content both before and after the event. The key is to find a captioning platform with archiving features so immediately after the event the videos can be archived with the captions and translations.
The Importance of Quality
While we have discussed the importance and benefits of captioning and translating live events, we would like to stress the importance of quality of captions and translation outputs. Simply having captions on the screen is not enough. They need to be accurately generated and verbatim with punctuation and be in-sync or close to sync with the live video. Live translations need to be of high quality and clearly understood by viewers. And finally, for production companies and customers the platform producing live captions and translations should be easy-to-use and affordable.
