Captioning at scale
In 2008, four students at the MIT Sloan School of Management developed a system for captioning online video that was far more efficient than traditional methods, which involve pausing a video frequently to write text and mark time codes. The system used automated speech-recognition software to produce “rough-draft” transcripts, displayed on a simple interface, that could easily be edited. Landing a gig to caption videos from five MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) classes, the students were able to caption 100 hours of content in a fraction the time of manual captioning. This marked the beginning of captioning-service company 3Play Media, which now boasts more than 1,000 clients and an equal number of contracted editors processing hundreds of hours of content per day. Clients include academic institutions, government agencies, and big-name companies — such as Netflix, Viacom, and Time Warner Cable — as well as many users of video-sharing websites. Today, 3Play’s system works much as...