OK. I know I’m posting a lot these few days. But this one is truly cool–several cool things, including both form + content, going on at once:
dotSUB.com does streaming video. Big deal–so do dozens of other sites, and YouTube is the best, you say. Well, YouTube can’t do subtitles. dotSub does and thus is very cool, in my book (and it’s the same size as YouTube’s videos (480 x 360 pixels) and seems to stream as smoothly). What’s particularly Web 2.0 about it is that any signed up subscriber can add sub-titles to videos. Sort of a viral unraveling of the Tower of web video Babel.
Check out this very excellent and clever instructional video on Blogs in Plain English from Common Craft. The original may be in plain English, but you can get sub-titles so far in Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese (traditional characters), Danish, Dutch, English (e.g., for hearing impaired), Galacian, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Turkish. Subtitles for Esperanto, French, Polish and Swedish are partially done (and you can help do those sub-titles, a la ‘wisdom of crowds’). And Common Craft has other instructional videos “in Plain English”: Wikis, Social Networking and Online Photo Sharing. My only gripes: 1)The sub-titles don’t work well in my Firefox for Windows XP, but work fine in IE7; 2)The sub-titles appear in a a transluscent black box that takes up the lower 25% of the screen–it’d be much better if they played in a separate sub-title windows so they didn’t obscure the video; 3)Full-screen mode would be nice; 4)there’s not a lot of content yet–they need to get Metcalf’s Law working for them.
Here’s how dotSUB.com describe themselves on their “About” page:
dotSUB is a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language. There is nothing to buy and nothing to download. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders of dotSUB created a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, “wiki” type environment. The dotSUB tool gives anyone the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the bottom of the video.
The idea of dotSUB was born in early 2004 after viewing the film “Fahrenheit 911.” Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of dotSUB, realized that if one documentary film in English might have an impact on a very close US Presidential election, what would happen if all independent and documentary films, television programming and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages – what a powerful impact on the world that would be!
The goal was to create a tool that was as simple to use as the Google search bar, with no downloads, that could engage the power, methodologies and thinking of open source, wikipedia, social networking, creative commons and web2.0 user involvement to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video.
It took three years to create the tool and process, and now dotSUB is integrating its functionality with businesses and organizations in all fields – for anyone using video as an internal or external communication tool. The “perfect storm” unleashed by the purchase of YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion has set in motion a frenzy in traditional media companies, as well as a plethora of start-ups, to figure out how to monetize video in English (or its native language). dotSUB is creating the ability and global network to re-purpose this content into all of the world’s languages at a cost approaching an order of magnitude less than using traditional tools and methods.
