Closed captioning

Looking for any ideas on various methods to add closed captioning to our live streaming services.

Anyone already using a company or service they would recommend?

What’s the budget? Are your services streamed live or sim live?

Hi Kyle,
There are services that offer auto captions, such as Telestream: Closed Captioning and Subtitling Products - MacCaption and CaptionMaker Overview - Telestream

There are also services that will do this live and remotely, such as Aberdeen: https://aberdeen.io
(We use them for our TV program)

If you have the equipment, consider Webcaptioner.org
We’ve use them, but the suggestion would be to integrate this into your video using an M/E channel on your board.

What we’re hunting for is the ability to switch video sources within the player on our Church Online Platform site… so that we can keep everyone together on the same chat window yet allow them to view different videos: CC on/off, Spanish translation, English, etc. etc. etc…

Anyways, hope that helps,

I have played with WebCaptioner.com as a free option. You can run a second instance of your stream and overlay two lines from WebCaptioner on the bottom.

An AI based service that will add actual closed captions to your stream (not an overlay) is Timed Text Speech from Telestream. It starts at $99/no plus usage. AI Captioning in the Cloud | Automated Subtitle Platform | Telestream Cloud

From there, the price goes up.

We had captioning turned on with or last Wednesday service stream. I asked what was changed and I got the standard end user response of ‘nothing’. After a little bit of conversation I found out that the used another laptop to send the stream. That being said I figured it was option in Facebook live producer or an option in the camera software we are using. I looked this morning on Facebook to see if I could find an option in FB which I did not. I unfortunately do not have the software for the camera available to me today to see if there is an option in there. I have been experimenting with OBS. A quick search on google I see that some overlay mentioned by others in this thread can be added to that. I would assume other software is similar. Like most things you get what you pay for words were just plain wrong during the sermon last time.

Hope this information helps you or others that will read this in the future.

The services are normally streamed live using LiveStream, Church Online Platform and FaceBook, although in this season, we are creating a video ahead of time. I am interested in real time closed captioning options.

Budget is still to be determined due to this season we are in and as we are eligible for a grant that could offset startup costs.

Really wanting excellent options rather than ones that only do a fair job for less cost. My initial instinct is a hard ware solution is best, but searching for input from folks that have gone down this path.

Hey Kyle! On Easter weekend, Facebook started automatically adding closed captioning to our live stream videos (we schedule Sim Live from Living As One). So if the user mutes audio, they will automatically get CC.

I’ve demonstrated this in a short video here. Hope this is helpful!

Steve

Thanks Steve. I really appreciate it.