Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

Interesting blog string over at: http://rsgeo007.blogspot.com/, particularly this post: http://rsgeo007.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-might-hulu-be-showing-its-captions.html. Robert and Jamie bring up some interesting points and show some excellent detective work. The main issue – how to do Closed Captioning…specifically, the technical and cost issues associated with it.

Most of us are thrilled with time shifting or choice, while overlooking some of the things that these guys really value – Closed Captioning. Well, adding CC to video, especially streaming media with a somewhat unknown audience size – can be expensive and labor intensive. Why would you “over invest” in an asset by manually adding in CC if you don’t know who will be watching it – much less if someone that needs CC or SAP?

Putting the legal and regulatory issues aside, any business person probably would agree that the investment is dubious at best. However, how do you expect to become the first option in viewing if you are not as feature rich as the old technology.

In short – cost effective process automation needs to be implemented to deliver content in many flavors – this includes the ‘3 screens’ (today’s focus) as well as for people that like to ‘hear’ it in various ways. Robert and Jamie did some good detective work to find Signiant.