Everyone knows (or at least every video maker should know) that adding closed-captions to your videos really helps SEO (because text is much easier for bots to crawl than video, pictures and audio). Before, the closed captions were part of the flash within YouTube videos, but now with "Interactive Transcription" YouTube's playing with, I'm guessing a few things:
1) the video landing page becomes SEO for other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or whatever;
2) this is a step to help them transition to HTML5, which handles closed captions like text within javascript (here's an example of captions in an HTML5 video, notice how you can select and copy the transcript just like regular text on a page);
3) clicking the text jumps forward to that point in the timeline of the video: for example, news sites can watch the video of a press conference and instantly jump to the segment they want without having to scrub through the timeline.
Again, to me, this is a really huge step for YouTube to be moving toward making the video an integral part of the website, and as I've said many times, I think the overall movement of online video is to step away from being considered "video," and simply just a website in of itself.
This doesn't seem to work for embedded videos. I came across ProTranscript which offers a similar solution with a more elegant look/feel.
ReplyDeleteBy using EasyCaptions with jwplayer, it is possible to provide interactive transcripts for embedded YouTube videos. See an example here -
ReplyDeletehttp://srt2html5.blogspot.com/p/interactive-transcripts.html