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Amara starts offering crowdsourced subtitles for all of your YouTube videos

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:25:01 +0000

Crowdsourced video captioning platform Amara launched an improved YouTube integration this week that allows any YouTube user to crowdsource the subtitling of their videos, utilizing many of the same tools that are being used by companies like TED, Khan Academy, Udacity and Netflix. The move could not only help YouTube producers to provide support for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but also expand their international audience.

Amara’s online subtitles editor.

Amara’s new offering links your YouTube account to a new or existing Amara account. Once that is done, all of your public videos are going to show up on your Amara profile, ready to be subtitled with the help of the platform’s subtitle editor. Users can add subtitles in dozens of languages.

You’ll also be able to invite others to help you, turning the process of captioning your videos into a collaborative project. Complete subtitles are automatically synced back to YouTube, making them accessible for anyone who watches the video. And Amara automatically edits a video’s description on YouTube, prompting your viewers to help you with the subtitling process.

YouTube’s automatic captions: not always that accurate.

Of course, YouTube already offers automatic, computer-generated captions. However, natural language processing only goes that far, and humans can greatly improve the accuracy of subtitles. But Amara’s offering is interesting for more than one reason: YouTube publishers can encourage their viewers to translate their videos into many different languages, which could help them greatly expand their audience, and subtitles can greaty improve video discoverability in search engines.

Amara, which was originally known as Universal Subtitles, has received $1 million in funding from the Mozilla Foundation and the Knight Foundation. It started out as an open access-inspired project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, but now also offers enterprise tools for corporate clients, which include Netflix, Twitter, TED and a number of online education startups. To date, Amara’s users have created 181,000 subtitle tracks across 238 languages.

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Netflix experiments with crowd-sourced captioning

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 19:41:31 +0000

Netflix just launched a subtitling community project on the video captioning service Amara, formerly known as Universal Subtitles. The company is looking for a limited number of volunteers on the site, and apparently wants to try using crowd-sourced captioning with a “popular 80s cartoon and other classic TV programming,” according to information posted on the site.

A Netflix spokesperson told me that the company’s efforts on the site simply represent a test:

“Netflix is committed to accessibility and we have decided to test Amara to see if it could work for Netflix content. This is a small scale, early stage test. It is premature to discuss if we would actually use the titles resulting from this test or any future use of Amara.”

Netflix’s captioning community on Amara currently only features one video, which according to information provided on the site represents “an example of Netflix SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) Guidelines in action.”

Netflix is known as a company that is obsessed with testing. That being said, a service like Amara could represent a significant opportunity for Netflix. The company currently offers close to 50,000 movies and TV show episodes in the U.S., and has been expanding to countries where customers speak French, Spanish and Portuguese over the last few months. Netflix is slated to announce another international expansion soon, which could add another language to its roster.

Crowd-sourced captioning and subtitle translation could help to provide closed captions in all of these markets, and alleviate the pressure it’s been facing from deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates. Netflix was sued for not providing captions for all of its videos a year ago, and a judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed last month.

Amara originally launched as Universal Subtitles, and allows users to transcribe videos with a simple online editor. The site has been used by media organizations like Al Jazeera and the PBS NewsHour as well as the popular education site Khan Academy to crowd-source captioning and translation. I’ve been told by the Amara folks that its community has now subtitled more than 100,000 videos total.

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