With President Obama signature this afternoon, online video content creators will be among those required to provide closed captioning, as part of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessiblity Act.
Captions are valuable for not only the hearing impaired, but transcriptons can make video more useful for discoverablity, watching when listening is not convenient and as a step to translation to other languages.
That said, there will be a burden on content creators to create accurate closed captions. YouTube has made considerable progress. Several companies see a business in speech to text closed captioning — and the new law will certainly be valuable to them
Recently we covered a new start-up called SpeakerText and have republished our interview with Matt Mireles. We have also covered PlyMedia. Our inteview with Matt Knopf is below. Here is our story on YouTube and automatic voice to text. Daisy interviews Ken Harrentsein. Video is at bottom of page. Another important player is dotSub, here is our report and video below of Michael Smolen.
