We appreciate that people would find subtitling on BBC News site clips useful, and are looking into whether/how the site could provide that. The issue isn't one of technicalities of getting subtitles into Flash video. We can already do this - check out the subtitles already on most streamed programmes on iPlayer for example. But the difficulty is in providing the subtitles for fast-moving news stories - either creating them specifically, or converting them reliably from offline to online content. That's a difficult issue to solve so I can't promise anything. At such time as we may have found ways to sort these issues, I'd most likely announce it on http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/. Jonathan Hassell Head of Audience Experience & Usability BBC FM+T
________________________________ From: [email protected] on behalf of Frankie Roberto Sent: Fri 16/01/2009 09:44 To: [email protected] Subject: [backstage] Captioning of Embedded Media Player content? BBC News seems to have started using video footage within its online news stories quite heavily (eg see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7832309.stm which has both a full-width and half-width version). My question really is whether there are any plans to incorporate captioning or subtitling (there's a subtle distinction between the two, see http://screenfont.ca/learn/ although the terms seems to get used interchangeably quite a lot). I've found myself wanting captions/subtitles quite a bit: for instance on the quiet coach of a train, when I don't have headphones with me. I understand that the technicalities of how to do video captioning well are complicated and contentious (see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/thisishowthewebgetsregulated/) but with Flash video you can at least have a stab at it. Frankie -- Frankie Roberto Experience Designer, Rattle 0114 2706977 http://www.rattlecentral.com <http://www.rattlecentral.com/>
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