Whether you have created some cool new episodes for your own Web show, or stumbled on a video that sparked you interest but way to hard to understand, you wonder how to expand its reach. Usually, the answer turns to be "let's get on some social network and entice others to put a back link to our content" and well, there is a simple and useful alternative: subtitle your videos. Here five reasons to do this way:
- Be viral and gain new audience — English Web users would be soon outnumbered by Indians and Chinese new comers. Their bandwidth capabilities already allow them to watch streaming videos like yours. Get them to understand your content and, who knows, you might end up being the next superstar in Asia.
- Be more search-able — Current search engines usually filter videos by keywords and tags. Subtitles enables them to do a full-text search, and depending on the relevancy of the video text, they can quickly decide to put it ahead of established ones.
- Increase video accessibility — Not all video makers enjoy top-notch camera equipment. Sometimes, sound quality turns awry enough that even a language interpreter cannot understand. Adding subtitles make everyone happy.
- Federate your fans — You provide great and entertaining contents to your fans. Usually, you request feedback from them through rating and comments. This time, invite them to a new group activity. Make them collaborate on your videos in useful and fun way. Your fans are your best ambassadors, says the adage, so don't loose them.
- Improve your language skills — In education, passion has always been a good engine to learn. So by looking at the word written and spoken by real people, you increase your capability to understand a foreign language while doing nothing.
Subtitles can provide a second life to buried videos. You want to make people happy with what you do, share what you like, we at Keskidi would like to help you share more.
"What are they saying on this video?"
Many times, that's been a tough question to answer. While English-speaking Web users can enjoy millions of videos shared in English on YouTube or MySpaceTV, the rest of the world watch them without any clue. And same interrogations raise in the reversed situation. What the Dalai Lama says about Tibet? What on earth this Spanish rapper talks about? Every day, a wealth of educational and cultural videos is created — university upload videos of knowledgeable professors, reporters add their documentaries — but who has resources to translate them all?
Our mission at Keskidi is to solve that problem. We aim to provide collaborative tools that enable you and your community to translate videos, and make it simple for you to share videos you like in multiple languages. We're an international video enhancer — a hub for videos to get known outside its language craddle.
Today we're launching the subtitling tool for five video sharing platforms: YouTube, Dailymotion, MySpaceTV, Blip.tv and Metacafe. Self-hosted videos can be translated as well. For each video, you can type in texts in fifteen languages including French, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese or Turkish. You'll find three major tools:
- Transcripts — the starting point of video translation. Video transcriptions are opened to any user of the site without any registration or fee. Added texts can be corrected at any time. The aim is to get the video transcript as fast as possible.
- Subtitles — the result of users collaboration. We do the work of building cool tools that are easy to handle, so you can easily update, correct or compare subtitles to each other.
- Widget — the video player you can put on your web page. Web users interested in a specific video can embed our video player in their web page or blogs. When the video is played, subtitles will appear at the bottom of the video. Each a subtitle is changed in here, it automatically and immediately appears on the widget too, so your viewers will see the most recent (and hopefully) the most accurate texts.
Our team of four has worked long and hard for several months to bring you these tools, and we're excited to unveil them to the world — but they're just the beginning. In the grand 21st Century tradition, our site is a work in progress, and we intend to add data and features rapidly over the coming days, weeks and months. If you have ideas, or find kinks in the system, we hope you'll take a moment to send us feedback using the contact form. Every message will be read.
Finally, as we've been working on Keskidi and accumulating expertise in this area for several months, we've got much more than a single announcement's worth of ideas and writings — so please come back to read this blog if you're interested in what we're doing.
We've had a ton of fun clicking around our sites while we've been building them, and we hope you find them useful and fun. Enjoy!
Thuan Huynh, Keskidi's founder