Closed Caption Services and The Content Boom

In recent years, and especially so in recent months, there has been much debate over AI and it’s potential impact on the human job market, especially when it come to closed caption services. With developments in voice recognition and auto-translation, many assume that one of the biggest industries to be in danger of losing out on the human workforce may be subtitling and closed captioning. Well, we at Capital Captions always have and always will, place our bets on living human beings to ensure the best quality subtitles. This blog will look at why.

Capital Caption’s Subtitling and Translation Work Ethos

As a global closed captioning company, providing professional quality closed caption services at reasonable prices is our priority. At Capital Captions, we believe subtitle writing requires skills, knowledge and expertise that AI just doesn’t have. Especially when it comes to Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers, subtitles that are fit for purpose don’t just display each word that is said, but rather, they consider more. Consider the below…

The best closed captions should be as verbatim as possible, whilst also remaining easy to read in terms of speed, timing and syntax. Where there are long pauses, subtitles should be split, even if they continue from one sentence. Where a speaker uses constant filler words such as ‘kind of, sort of, you know,’ these should be kept in to reflect speech style but removed where their frequency renders the subtitles difficult to read and follow. After all, the way we speak is very different to the way we write and word for word transcriptions that don’t take this into account can lead to exhaustingly long winded closed captions that constantly stop and start, are riddled with needless commas, parentheses and ellipses.

A professional writer will know how best to write closed captions in situations where a speaker’s use of English isn’t optimal, where there are stutters and mispronunciations even. AI cannot do this, and it’s questionable whether it ever should.

The Content Boom

We recently spoke with Kirsten Chuba, a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter, who has recently published an article ‘Caption This: Why Subtitling Is Big Business Amid the Content Boom.’ Precipitated by recent regulations being introduced around the need for captions and the increased use of mobile devices to watch online video content, the demand for subtitles and/or closed captions to accompany video content is expanding at an exponential rate. This growing need is pushing many companies into using more voice recognition, machine translation and subtitle automation programmes to create captions for content. But whilst this can mean providing closed captions faster, it all too often leads to compromises on quality.

Closed captions and subtitles are big business nowadays, and companies naturally want to expand to provide more and more captions, with higher and higher revenues. At Capital Captions, whilst we aim to keep up with the expanding need for captions and also provide urgent closed captioning services of under 4 hours, as required, we are strict on our ethos not to compromise quality and that means limiting the use of AI to programmes which assist in subtitle creation, whilst relying on humans to make the writing, timing and formatting choices in the best interests of viewers.

The Intricacies of Closed Caption Writing and Creation

Closed caption services don’t just revolve around transcribing content that is there. The best closed captions are also sensitive to what sounds need to be described and they describe those sounds in a way that should fit in seamlessly with the video. Over-descriptions in closed captions aren’t only distracting but can be highly frustrating to viewers. If we see a door being slammed, we don’t need to read ‘Door slams’. If we’re watching a swashbuckling pirate movie and there’s a swordfight, we don’t need the description of every sword chink and pirate grunt. Viewers want to enjoy the action in a way that’s natural, but where nothing important is missed. Reading superfluous closed captions can be infuriating.

Closed Caption Services for Online, Broadcast, Social Media and more…

Formatting is a huge part of closed captioning services and any given style is rarely a fits-all solution. Designed for use online, SRT closed captions often have character limits of 47 and above, but with the boom in mobile phone videos which are portrait in orientation, limits need to be tailored to allow captions to fit onscreen. However, some online video sharing sites also offer compatibility with other caption formats which allow styling, such as VTT, STL or DFXP, so video producers are often choosing to tailor their captions depending on these formats, to make the most of what is available.

When it comes to broadcast closed caption services, the requirements differ widely, depending on the broadcast service. BBC EBU-TT closed captions have set guidelines around how subtitles should be grammatically split, how reading speeds should be set based on the age of the target audience, and which colours should be used to denote speakers.  Guidelines can also include how sound should be described, for instance, ‘Door slams’ versus ‘Door slamming’, as well as whether these descriptions should be written with round brackets, square brackets and/or capitalised. Similarly, Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus and other Video-on-Demand services will have their own guidelines, and may request STL, EBU-TT, DFXP, SCC or CAP closed captions, and should a programme run through more than one channel, the captions will need to be altered and reformatted accordingly. This was recently the case with the introduction of Paramount Plus to the UK.

Working with the Right Company

Whatever the requirement for closed caption services, working with a well-established, reputable closed captioning company is key, and while AI solutions may seem financially appealing, there is a surprising amount of work involved in closed caption creation, which for the best results, take the best brains – human brains.

So there you have it, if you have a feature film or social media video which you would like closed caption services for then why not look at the options below and choose the right option for you.