New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Rev.com (https://www.rev.com), the leader in on-demand remote services, today announced the launch of its video captioning service. Rev's captioning service has been operating in beta for over a year; its general availability builds on Rev's existing translation and transcription offerings to provide digital media content providers with a premium quality, fast turnaround video captioning option to meet FCC deadlines(1), make content SEO-friendly and deliver an optimal viewing experience to consumers.
The FCC requires captions on broadcast video to make them widely accessible, including to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. These requirements have existed for decades but given the explosion of streaming media and video-on-demand (VOD), they are now being applied to online video. Today's deadline requires captions on online videos that have already appeared on television.
Industry insiders expect the caption mandate to only grow over time. Class action lawsuits have accelerated this trend, including recent lawsuits against Netflix (2), CNN (3), and Harvard (4).
Moreover, captioned videos are easier to watch, easier to find, and easier to remember:
Easier to watch: The BBC reports (5) that 20 percent of TV watchers in the UK use captions, and 80 percent of them have no hearing impairment
Easier to find: ReelSEO (6) found that YouTube videos with captions are found seven percent more often than those without captions
Easier to remember: Many studies have found that captions help people learn a second language. Plus they improve retention (7) of educational videos
"Rev is excited to launch our third service, as we build out our vision to become 'the Amazon of Remote Work,'" says Jason Chicola, CEO of Rev.com. "Caption demand has exceeded our expectations; we are serving clients from old media to new media, college education to online education. Cable channels, TV stations, YouTube stars, universities - all need captions, and volumes are exploding as they create more video and distribute in more languages. This is the first time we've had a service reach a seven figure revenue run-rate so quickly. We are bullish on the future of online video."
"Captioning our online videos is one of the many tools we provide to make our content more accessible and engaging," says Tony Alznauer, Post Production Supervisor at AOL. "Adding captions to videos has been a top request from our users; it helps us reach a larger audience with higher quality entertainment. We tried other service providers, but found Rev to be the fastest and most accurate, which enhances the viewing experience for our visitors."
Rev uses a distributed workforce comprised of skilled freelancers to deliver translation, transcription and now video captioning services to businesses at half the price and twice the speed of traditional vendors. In contrast with other freelance marketplaces, Rev hires and manages the worker thus eliminating the need for a customer to do the heavy-lifting of managing remote workers. Rev vets each worker, gives them a series of tests prior to admission, grades their work and upholds them to high performance standards to stay within the network. Workers are paid a set rate per minute of audio or video transcribed, or per word translated.
"I've been in the film business for 15 years, and Rev is an extremely disruptive service, says
Linda Nelson, CEO of
Nelson Madison Films, an independent movie production studio. "Rev proves that a product can be fast, inexpensive and high-quality. It used to cost thousands of dollars to properly caption a film, money that any film on a budget does not have to spare; now it costs a hundred bucks. We are adding five films a week to distribution channels including Netflix, iTunes and Hulu, and we've not once had a film that was captioned by Rev that didn't meet platform QC and FCC expectations."
About Rev.com
Rev is the leader in on-demand remote services, and offers audio transcription, video captions, and document translation. Rev works with the top 10 percent of freelancers, and delivers services to businesses at half the price and twice the speed of traditional vendors. Unlike offerings that require businesses to coordinate projects directly with freelancers, Rev vets the workers, manages the project, and guarantees quality. Rev's mission is to build the best place for freelancers to work. Rev is headquartered in San Francisco and is funded by Globespan Capital. https://www.rev.com
(1) FCC.gov, updated February 20, 2015
(2) Boston.com, October 10, 2012
(3) SFGate.com, February 4, 2012
(4) New York Times, February 12, 2015
(5) BBC, March 31, 2006
(6) ReelSEO, July 15, 2014
(7) Language Learning & Technology, February 2014
