What should I know regarding subtitles for the city council?
A live broadcast may be published for a maximum of two weeks before the Web Directive in Sweden requires it to be subtitled. Should we therefore delete council broadcasts after two weeks, spend resources on manually subtitling several hours of material, or should we exceed the requirements and post subtitles on the same day?
The web directive exempts live broadcasts from subtitling requirements. Still, as a rule, the broadcast is made available to viewers as recorded video-on-demand to make it possible to watch whenever it suits the viewer. So when we publish the video as a video-on-demand the law applies and the content must be subtitled promptly. There are four different ways to deal with this:
1. Live Captions
Here you get subtitles immediately for the live broadcast – which is very convenient. One disadvantage, however, is that the cost of live captioning tends to be very high. The cost can therefore be difficult to justify, especially for small organizations with only a handful of viewers and where no one may even use the subtitles. Another disadvantage is the quality of live captions, which are usually of significantly lower quality compared to when you subtitle afterwards.
2. Deleting the material within two weeks
Here you follow the rules – but without increasing accessibility at all. Legal but bad! In addition, the material has been published for two weeks when in fact, not everyone has the opportunity to access it. Of course, you should have subtitles for the city council!
3. Subtitle video
Manually creating subtitles for videos as long as the city council yourself is a very time-consuming task. The alternative for manual captioning is to lease out the work, but it usually becomes very costly when it comes to long videos. The advantages are that there will be very high-quality subtitles. The disadvantages are thus the high costs and the time required.
4. Automatic subtitles
In many ways, the best option! With automatically created subtitles, you can have a finished subtitled video available quickly after the broadcast is finished. Subtitles for a three-hour meeting are ready in about an hour and a half! It is also cost-effective – significantly cheaper than both manual or live subtitles and the content of the entire meeting becomes searchable. However, the downside is that the subtitles, although getting better and better all the time, are not of the same quality as manually subtitled videos. However, it is possible to easily and quickly correct the most obvious errors in an automatically generated subtitle and significantly increase the quality.
In conclusion
Subtitles are a requirement, and deletion of material after two weeks is a bad solution. Streamio offers integration with subtitle engines where you can order both fast automatic subtitles and manual subtitles, depending on your needs. As more and more content becomes video-based and communication costs go up, it is essential to make trade-offs based on the content, how many people are watching, and who it is intended for – this without compromising on accessibility. Solutions that are good enough allow you to continue communicating with video in a professional and accessible way with subtitled city councils.
