Closed Captioning and Subtitling for Social Media

Unlike closed captions and subtitling for TV Broadcast, social media platforms offer very limited support for TV producers who are looking to publish promotional content on social media. Often, critical formatting such as positioning on the screen and splitting captions are not possible with popular social media platforms. In addition, many content producers are burning-in their subtitles to get more attention on Social Media feeds. In some cases, a social media platform may not support captions of any kind when streaming live feeds or uploading pre-recorded promotional videos. This becomes a challenge to broadcasters who want to repurpose TV closed caption data to social media. While captions and memes seem to be all the rage in viral social media posts, content producers are publishing promotional videos with captions to stay competitive. The captions and subtitles are becoming important to all mobile users. The average user does not use audio when using social media on the go. Therefore captioning and subtitling is an essential part of publishing to social media. — Publishing captioned and subtitled content to social media doesn't have to be a difficult manual task. There are many ways to automate this process along with transcoding and delivery of video with captions or subtitles. Today broadcasters can leverage speech to text tools, caption authoring, and transcoding mechanisms that support publishing video with captions to social media. This paper takes a look at the challenges and formats associated with publishing captioned and subtitled content in Social Media. We will discuss the various caption files that are currently supported by the popular social media platforms. Also, we will examine the pros and cons to doing burn-in subtitles. As some broadcasters are obligated to publish content with captions due to strict government regulations, social media platforms may need to change their caption deliverables to support proper accessibility standards. Finally, we can look at various pitfalls of captioning that could cost broadcasters time and money when publishing to social media.

Published

2017-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

closed captioning, subtitling, social media, automation, speech to text, publishing

DOI

10.5594/M001804

ISBN

978-1-61482-959-1