I actually think there is room for a "human-assisted collaborative captioning" effort. You'd start with the results of automated speech recognition, and then you'd add in Google Docs-style collaborative editing of the closed captioning / fan subs.
Imagine if you could save a video by watching it and correcting the typos in the existing transcript.
But there's no way it'd be a viable business. (That's Rev, and it costs $1/minute, and it doesn't even give you a .srt file that you can upload to YouTube.)
Plus, you'd have to deal with spam/abuse, and creative uses of captions (e.g. niconico).
I tried building a prototype of this in college, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work financially, so I had to take a paid summer internship at YouTube.
To put it lightly, the Amara platform needs work. If you try to sign in with both Google and Facebook and the same e-mail address, you end up creating two separate accounts that are impossible to link/merge. Never mind that people have multiple email addresses and phone numbers and YouTube accounts in real life.
If it has existed for years, why wasn't it used to save the UC Berkeley library videos?
I'm thinking more of a Google Docs style interface, where you can make a lightweight edit (only one or two lines of captions) and someone else can concurrently time and edit other lines.
Imagine if you could save a video by watching it and correcting the typos in the existing transcript.
But there's no way it'd be a viable business. (That's Rev, and it costs $1/minute, and it doesn't even give you a .srt file that you can upload to YouTube.)
Plus, you'd have to deal with spam/abuse, and creative uses of captions (e.g. niconico).
I tried building a prototype of this in college, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work financially, so I had to take a paid summer internship at YouTube.