, the leading video accessibility provider, announced today the availability of Live Professional Captioning, becoming the first captioning platform to offer professional captioning by a human with auto captioning failover. The new platform is the first major technology innovation in the live captioning market in years and revitalizes the industry, which has historically been reliant on expensive and manual, outdated processes.

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“The need for live captioning has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic, and we’re not seeing it slow down”

Live video has been increasing in popularity over the last five years, but usage exploded during the pandemic. According to 3Play Media’s most recent State of Captioning survey, 60 percent of respondents are captioning live video and nearly half are producing up to 1,000 hours of live streaming video annually.

“The need for live captioning has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic, and we’re not seeing it slow down,” Josh Miller, co-CEO and co-founder, 3Play Media, said. “However, companies have had to choose between live automatic captions, which don’t provide the accuracy necessary for accessibility or a quality user experience, and traditional human-produced live captioning, which is historically manual and expensive but provides better accuracy. Our solution is the first to provide the best of both worlds for viewers and publishers – modern, platform-based technology with high accuracy and reliability.”

Chris Antunes, co-CEO and co-founder, 3Play Media, added, “Our new live captioning platform creates captions powered by a trained voice writer and a proprietary web-based tool developed by 3Play Media to accurately recognize a trained voice writer’s speech and produce consistently accurate and reliable captions at scale. When we consider 3Play Media’s proven approach to unsupervised captioner training that requires just a laptop and a microphone, paired with self-service customer event management, we see a solution that redefines live captioning.”

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Automated workflow brings trust to live captioning

Live Professional Captioning is the first live captioning service to provide users with a failover. If a captioner loses connectivity, internet, or power, the 3Play Media auto caption failover will take over within seconds and fail back immediately when the captioner reconnects. This is in sharp contrast to the industry norm that finds most captioning vendors scrambling to reconnect or find another captioner.

Automation plays a key role in scheduling, too. 3Play Media’s web-based scheduling interface integrates with video and conferencing platforms, including Brightcove, YouTube, and Zoom, and offers RTMP captioning for over 30 different platforms. An overview dashboard helps users manage all live captioning events in one location and see the status of upcoming and in progress events. The scheduler also provides the user with key information pre-event, such as when the event has been matched to a captioner, when the captioner has checked in for an event and, during the event, general transparency around stream and caption status. API event scheduling enables customers to integrate and manage event scheduling in their business systems. Most caption vendors are still scheduling over email and using spreadsheets, which provides little to no visibility into the process or flexibility for content owners.

“Live Professional Captioning gave me a lot of peace of mind for our Accessibility Camp Symposium. I definitely feel this product was worthwhile and helpful – it saved my sanity, relieved a lot of headaches, and helped carry the event’s accessibility,” Jeremy Seda, North Idaho College, said. “It’s been a great experience working with 3Play Media and a breath of fresh air to be able to put your trust in a vendor and know that we’re going to get quality live captions. Not only does 3Play care about accessibility, they care about me, and that translates clearly when utilizing their services like Live Professional Captioning.”

“Video has become an essential component of how businesses are engaging and informing people; the newest integration with 3Play Media makes live video even more accessible to all audiences,” said Rajan Shah, Vice President, Technology Partners & Integrations at Brightcove. “3Play’s Professional Live Captioning together with Brightcove deliver high-quality captioning services for live events, supported by the human touch that customers have come to love and expect. Professional Live Captioning seamlessly integrates with Brightcove to extend our current on-demand capability and allows customers to enable Live Captioning in just a few clicks through the Brightcove Marketplace.”

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