Live Professional Captioning

3Play Media offers Live Professional Captioning for live events.  This service uses live, human captioners to caption live streaming events in real time.  If you don't see "Live Captioning" in the top navigation of your 3Play Account, you can navigate to your project level settings to enable the Live Captioning module (or contact your 3Play Media Account Manager for assistance). 

Once activated, users can set up an integration with a supported video platform (Zoom, Youtube, or Brightcove). In addition to posting captions back to supported platforms, you can also use 3Play’s Live Caption Embed or Second Screen Webpage to display captions to livestream audiences. You can find support documentation on how to link your video platform to 3Play in the relevant section of our Live Captioning documentation here. 

Following integration, users must schedule Live Captioning in advance for a live-streaming event.  Captions will display as the event is streamed in real time with a 5-6 second delay (which is adjustable through 3Play's Advanced Settings).  

Please note that the quality of the captions will vary depending on the quality of the audio, the audio stream, and the duration of the delay that is set when the event is scheduled.

3Play recommends you follow the tips below to ensure more accurate captions for your professional live captioned events:

• Captions for live events work best when the event contains high-quality audio and one person is speaking at a time (no overlapping audio)
• Add event instructions and a wordlist to help 3Play better understand the context around your event

All Live Captioning users are strongly encouraged to run a test event with 3Play’s live service to ensure it works for their setup.

Below are the requirements needed to use 3Play Media's Live Captioning, once the module is activated by your 3Play Media account manager.

• A live streaming encoding software that can support RTMP as an output, for example OBS (download HERE) or Streamyard. (Not needed for Zoom  or Streamless events)
• Hosting platform that provides RTMP streams. 
• A scheduled live event in the 3Play Media Live Captioning module, from which one can retrieve the Live Captioning plugin embed code. (Plugin optional for native caption integrations such as Zoom or Youtube)