Storm Berry TV: Online Subtitling for YouTube Videos
April 25, 2007 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers
Online video rapidly crosses linguistic borders, so quick subtitling becomes a natural requirement. What’s the quickest way to put subtitles on a video? Why, have a community provide them, of course! That’s where startup Storm Berry TV comes in, providing users with online subtitling tools for YouTube videos.
Users can submit different sets of subtitles for videos, allowing for multiple interpretations. Those subtitles, in turn, can be automatically translated from English into three other languages. Since Storm Berry TV doesn’t actually host videos, they should be free and clear of YouTube’s legal hassles — unless, of course, those RIAA douchebags go copyright trolling for lyrics. First adopters: anime fansubbers. You gotta love how otaku embrace online video mashups.
Not all YouTube videos are English, and not all YouTube viewers speak English. Community-powered subtitling should increase YouTube video views across all languages. With so much access to Google’s enormous financial and engineering resources, YouTube should consider buying Storm Berry TV, or at least cloning its functionality. The latter shouldn’t be too hard for Google engineers to do, considering Storm Berry TV is really a mashup of existing APIs.
If Storm Berry TV does gain traction — and considering the multilingual nature of the videosphere, it very well could — expect online subtitling to eventually become a standard video sharing feature.
I am concerned about the quality of user generated captions. As a co-founder of a company that provides free professional quality captions for online content to many in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, captions that are not of the highest quality levels is a very important issue.
Storm Berry TV allows multiple captions. Perhaps they should implement a voting system for captions, so the best become default.
Hmm… isn’t there another service providing subtitling before Storm Berry TV? But as far as I tested.. Storm Berry TV is better.
I’ve recently wrote an article on online video subtitling proposing a microformat and implementation based on speech recognition output as a default text for human editors.