Making use of captions is a great way of ensuring your video content is accessible for all your viewers. Because of this, we advise our clients to always add professional captions to videos when possible. Sometimes, this may not be an option, and in those cases automatically generated captions offered by YouTube can be a great solution. If available, they will now be automatically imported into the Blue Billywig Online Video Platform.
How it works
When you import or export a video from or to YouTube, the platform will check whether YouTube has automatically generated captions for it. If they are available, they will be downloaded automatically and be made available in the platform under the “Languages” > “Subtitles” tab. The automatically generated captions can be easily recognised by the text “[auto]”. The check with YouTube will take place every 4 hours, so it might take a little while before they show up in the platform.
Important to note:
The automatically imported subtitles will be given the status “Draft” after the import. YouTube uses automated speech recognition software when generating captions. This leaves some room for error, so we advise all our clients to check through the subtitle file to correct any errors in the captions before publishing. Once your captions look good, you can publish them to set them live as an option within your content.
Google indexing
In addition to increasing accessibility, this new feature will also help improve the findability of your video. The imported subtitles are automatically added to the page metadata as a transcript, which helps search engines understand what the video is about. This gives you increased chances of better indexation!
