Captions Are Increasingly Essential to Making Video Content More Accessible

Panopto, a leading video platform provider for businesses and universities, announced dramatically lower prices for its Section 508-compliant video captioning services. The company’s captioning services now cost as little as $1.00 per minute including a service level agreement (SLA) for turnaround time, ADA-compliant accuracy, and a support team that can answer questions and respond to tickets. Panopto is the first vendor to offer this level of pricing backed by a comprehensive SLA.

Human-based captioning has traditionally involved untenable tradeoffs. The services are either cost-prohibitive at scale, non-compliant with ADA accessibility statutes, or they take too long to deliver. Panopto’s new offering disrupts the existing captioning market, eliminating these tradeoffs to provide customers with an affordable, accurate, timely solution.

Customers can purchase the captioning services as part of their Panopto contract, with pricing based on turnaround time:

• For captions requiring 24 hour-processing, Panopto has cut pricing to $2.00/minute
• For captions requiring 48 hour-processing, Panopto has cut pricing to $1.50/minute
• For captions requiring 96 hour-processing, Panopto has cut pricing to $1.00/minute

“When we first built Panopto at Carnegie Mellon University, our goal was to improve the accessibility of classroom learning. Today’s announcement is the next logical step toward that goal, enabling organizations to invest in captioning at scale and providing more people around the world with an accessible video learning experience,” said Eric Burns, co-founder and CEO of Panopto.

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In universities and businesses, captions are increasingly essential to making video content more accessible. Captioning not only supports hard-of-hearing and deaf viewers as well as those who aren’t fluent in the language spoken in a recording, but also helps compensate for poor audio quality or background noise within a video, and can make a video more useful when a person is watching with the sound off or in a noisy environment.

This announcement applies exclusively to Panopto’s own 1st-party captioning services, and does not affect any requests sent via Panopto to 3rd-party caption service providers. Panopto continues to partner with cielo24, 3Play Media, Automatic Sync Technologies (AST), Rev.com and Verbit.ai as 3rd-party providers. These partners enable Panopto customers to negotiate customized volume discounts, legal agreements, and additional services, such as captioning approval workflows and departmental billing chargebacks. Panopto will also continue to make automatic, machine-generated transcripts available and editable for any institution that relies on Panopto’s Smart Search as a starting point for creating captions.

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