Transcription and Captioning Services for YouTube Videos – Why? What are the Benefits?

You may have heard that YouTube added auto-captioning capabilities to its videos in March 2010. But why is captioning your videos on YouTube so important? YouTube says it’s all about accessibility. In addition, providing captions for the videos you post on any video-sharing website including YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo can benefit both you and your video-watching audience in more ways than one.

Having your YouTube videos transcribed/captioned provides three main benefits:

• Captions help the deaf and hard of hearing to understand your video content.
• Captioning can significantly boost your video’s SEO (search engine optimization) by encouraging Google and YouTube to index your content.
• Posting the transcript below the captioned video also boosts the video’s ranking and allows viewers to scan the content without having to view the video.

YouTube is currently using Google’s speech recognition technology to automatically produce captions for videos where English is spoken. However, if you’ve ever tried to enable the captions on a YouTube video while watching it, you know that the quality of the captions may be hit or miss or just plain terrible, as most videos posted on video-sharing sites are not professionally produced and often have ample background noise.

So if the auto-captioning feature is not producing accurate captions for you, how do you add captions to your YouTube videos? One option is to buy and learn to use captioning software that may cost you up to $1,600 or more. There are also a few sites that will let you use their software for free (Overstream.net); however, you’d better have lots of time to look over their tutorials, as creating captions this way when you’re unfamiliar with the software could take some time to master.

So, if you’re not so tech-savvy or ready to shell out the big bucks, there’s one more option. You can always hire a transcription and captioning service for YouTube videos. A captioning service can create a time-coded caption file for you, and all you have to do is upload it to YouTube. Video captioning services’ rates usually run no higher than $12/min.