Closed Captioning For Online TV
A new Spreety video gives tips on how to use closed captioning with TV shows online.
The entertainment world is moving to the next generation of closed captioning technology with online TV, as a new Spreety.com video demonstrates.
For example, ABC.com has the ability to customize white on black vs. black on white text. FOX.com does a good job of moving captions to the top or the bottom of the screen, based on the most appropriate place for the text to be displayed.
PBS and PBS Kids have most of their shows online with closed caption support.
NBC.com leaves something to be desired, as the support is spotty per episode, and the text is sometimes out of synch with the video. Thankfully, the NBC shows can also be watched on Hulu with closed captions, sometimes in languages other than English. Hulu further innovates with a caption search feature that hot links to the matching video clip.
The lines between closed captions and subtitles are further blurred by YouTube. With any YouTube video, Speech to Text technology can be used to generate same language captions. Then, through translation software, the captions can be rendered in many languages.
So, Spreety TV Online tried it out YouTube’s new features with the recent “Nickelodeon TV Online 2010” video, and realized a few glitches. The spoken words of “Spreety.com” were transcribed as “breeding duck on”. “Avatar the Last Airbender” came out as “Avatar the last year vendor”. Not to be obvious, but “Degrassi” was just “grassy”. Thankfully, the generated speech to text captions can be easily loaded in to a word processor, such as Microsoft’s Word, edited, and then reloaded in a matter of minutes.
“If people just knew how much TV is online, there would be mass abandonment of the old TV”, according to Spreety co-founder Ron Laughton. “We created Spreety to educate people about the legal places to watch free TV online.”
The Spreety video is on YouTube titled “Closed Captioning for Online TV”. Spreety TV Online : Watch TV Shows Online Free is a free television guide for the Internet, located at www.spreety.com .
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