How subtitiling in Online Video will expand online minutes
I have been thinking a lot about how as more and more video content from across the world turn up Online the whole sub-titling issue will become very important. To understand this a little bit on language cinema. Today there are very robust film making industry outside of Hollywood for example China, India, France, Iran, Russia, Italy, Japan etc. 99.9% of the video content coming out of these countries are in local language. However the video sharing sites to which they are being up-loaded like Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe etc have a world-wide reach. The video content from these countries have an opportunity to find new audiences outside of their countries. This will happen once consumers can get sub-title on the fly as they are watching a video. On this issue i read a great post by Fred Wilson a part of which i quote below:
The larger point I am making here is that by open sourcing subtitles, we are making it easier to watch films and other forms of video that are made in other languages. People in Israel can watch TV shows and films made in the US in hebrew subtitles. People in the US can watch TV shows and films made in India in english subtitles. The possibilities go on and on. We don’t need to wait for the producers of the films to release them in foreign languages (if they ever choose to do so). We can simply get the footage we want to watch and find a subtitle for it on the Internet.avc.com, A VC, Oct 2009
If users can get subtitles on the fly while they are watching the Video content Online then it will open a whole new opportunity for U.S, European and Asian consumers to enjoy the fantastic movies and television serials that are being created by different cultures. I remember the time i had spent in South Asia doing an assignment and i really enjoyed some of the serials being produced in local languages. The social impact of something like this happening can be very far reaching. The power of images is far reaching and more unifying than text. Text or language act as barriers for rapid spread of language specific art and culture. Video or moving Images does not suffer from the same amount of barriers as text.
