YouTube Expands Auto-Captioning Program

Whether they're used for the benefit of the hard of hearing, people who speak a different language, or just folks who want to watch videos while at work or in a library, captions can be helpful in all sorts of circumstances.  And now, captions should become much more common, as all YouTube users will be able to take advantage of an auto-caption tool.

This tool is designed to work on all English-language clips that have relatively decent audio.  A "request processing" button will be available for content creators who want to minimize a processing delay, and after the English caption has been created, they'll have the option to translate it into any of about 50 languages.

Interesting, right?  Popular, too, if YouTube's predictions prove correct (see the graph below).

The one slight catch (aside from the English-only and audio quality restrictions touched on earlier) relates to accuracy; YouTube's making no guarantees that its captions will be perfect.  But content creators will have the option of editing the captions, so this is hardly a dealbreaker.

A YouTube representative assured WebProNews in an email, "This is an exciting moment for us and represents a culmination of 3 years of work at Google and YouTube.  Auto-Captions for everyone represents one of the largest projects of its kind and will open up millions of YouTube videos to deaf and hard-of-hearing."

Online Video Views are Not “Lost” on ABC.com

Last Tuesday, the season premiere of the hit television show "Lost" aired, and not only was it watched by over 12 million people, but it drove record online viewing at ABC.com the next day, with over 580,000 episode starts on the site. That's over 34% more than last season's premiere. ABC shared some details with us.

When asked why they think this particular episode of Lost had such an impact on online views compared with other episodes and other shows, a representative for ABC told WebProNews, "Lost has been a top performer in terms of online viewing since we began making episodes available online several years ago. Fans of the show tend to be very tech-savvy and also tend to watch episodes more than once.  They also frequently go online to review specific scenes."

On Tuesday, leading up to the airing of the show, ABC.com saw over 1.8 million unique visitors and delivered over 7.4 million page views, a 5% and 43% increase, respectively over the previous year’s premiere date, based on data from Omniture. Visitors to ABC.com logged more than 2.2 million video views of "Lost"-related short-form content on Tuesday, an increase of over 32% compared to last season.

ABC gives viewers more than just the videos though. This season, ABC.com offers interactive, community-driven features including user-created Top 5 lists which allow fans to arrange, rank and share their personalized lists of show-related favorites; and Episode Commentary where fans can access commentaries created by series' insiders, and create and share their own for each episode. 

The site will also soon unveil a Fan Art Wall, an interactive area for fans to upload, view and rate "Lost"-themed art created by fellow fans, and also give fans the opportunity to participate in a promo contest, providing users a "mash-up" tool to create and share their own "Lost" promos with a winning promo to be featured on-air.

There has been some talk about just how well TV shows will perform online in the future as Nielsen makes data available about the viewing of commercials that run in particular shows, whether they are viewed on TV or online. This could lead to online TV shows getting more ad-heavy.

"ABC.com's full episode player features interactive video advertising," ABC tell us. "Lost episodes currently feature a single national sponsor. They have 4 30-second spots which can't be skipped; additionally the local ABC affiliates sell one local spot per episode."

We won't be able to compare Lost episodes from this season with episodes after the Nielsen stuff goes down, because this is the final season of the show, but it is going to be quite interesting to see how advertising on popular shows changes, if it does in fact do so.

Google Tool Shows Where the Eyeballs Go on Your Site

Google has launched a new Google Labs experiment called Browser Size, which is a tool aimed at helping webmasters see how others view their site. Google's official description of the tool says:

Ever wondered what parts of your site can't be seen without scrolling? Browser Size shows you what portion of users can see a give spot on the screen. This is not screen resolution but the area available to the browser - as gathered from www.google.com users.

Here is what it looks like:



"In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page," says Google Senior Software Engineer, Bruno Bowden. "If it's a really important piece, then it's placed 'above the fold,' which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper."

"The same concept applies to browsers as well," he adds. "There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a 'Donate' button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely."

To use the tool, simply enter your URL and it will insert your page into the graph showing the percentage of people who are likely to see each area. Don't be surprised if a lot of websites suddenly start shifting to the left.

The tool was one of Google's "20% time" projects. A post on the Google Code blog has some interesting details about how the project came about and grew to what it is.


Have You Read This?

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New Google Feature Could Steal Some of Bing’s Travel Thunder

Google has launched a new "Translated Search" tool as one of the search engines search options. Google's search options can currently be accessed by clicking "show options" on any results page, once a search has been performed (although you may not even have to do that soon). The idea is that searchers can more easily find and read content written in other languages.

Google has offered a similar feature in Google Translate, for quite some time, but this brings it right to the searcher's realm of familiarity. Let's face it. Most Google users probably don't even know Google Translate exists, and if they do, it may not occur to them to use it as a means for searching for content.

"Now, when you search on Google for something in your own language, you can use this tool to search the web in another language," says Google. "Click 'Show Options' at the top of the search results page and select 'Translated search' to try it out. We'll algorithmically select the best language(s) to translate your search query into and then return you translated results from those pages. We'll even display results from multiple languages."

"For example, if you search for [restaurant reviews antwerp] while on vacation in Belgium and want to find more reviews or review sites beyond those that are just available in English, select "Translate search" in the 'Show Options' panel," the company adds. "We'll automatically select French and Dutch (the languages spoken in Belgium), translate your query into these languages and then translate the results back into English for you to read. If you’d like to search specific languages, just modify the languages in the panel above the results. You can display results for up to five languages at once and select from 51 languages to search."

If Google moves forward with the SERP redesign that it has been testing, this feature could have an impact on Bing usage for all things travel. The Translated Search feature obviously has purpose for other kinds of searches, but the example above makes a really good case for using it while traveling to other countries.

Google is in the process of rolling the feature out, so it is possible that you do not have it available yet, but you should very soon from the sound of it.

Have You Read This?

> Google Launches Search Options

> Google Presents New Image Search Options

> Google's Search Options Increase

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