FAQs

Yes, we offer live auto-captioning using automated speech recognition. Our live auto-captioning service integrates with video and meeting platforms like YouTube, Zoom, Facebook, Brightcove, JW Player, as well as any given RTMP stream. Additionally, we offer upgrade paths to our full transcription and captioning service with human editing and review to ensure a fully compliant, 99%+ accurate caption file on the recording.

We provide captioning/transcription in 25 source languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, Hebrew, Thai, Indonesian, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian, and Swedish.

We integrate with dozens of video platforms (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Kaltura), lecture capture systems (e.g. Mediasite, Panopto), learning management systems (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas), and cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, Box). These integrations can be set up in a matter of minutes and greatly simplify your workflow.

We offer machine captioning/transcription (using automatic speech recognition) with an option to add human review at a later time.

Audio description is an accommodation for blind and low-vision viewers that narrates the critical visual information in a video to provide context, clarify speakers, and articulate visual elements. We offer standard and extended audio description.

After your transcript/captions have been created, they can be translated to almost any language.

The 3Play Plugin creates an interactive, accessible, and multilingual video experience for viewers. It is an all-in-one plugin that allows you to activate an interactive transcript, translations, audio descriptions, captions, and SEO features. It is customizable and supports most video players and LMS systems.

If you already have a transcript, you can upload it along with the video and we’ll synchronize the text to produce captions.

We offer automated and manual caption placement services to help you meet FCC requirements cost-effectively. Automated caption placement uses an algorithm to analyze the screen and determine the position of the caption frame. With manual caption placement, a transcript editor personally checks the placement of each caption frame, ensuring 100% that captions don’t block important visual elements.

We provide a range of turnaround options (down to 2 hours), but what sets us apart is our proven ability to consistently meet those deadlines. Historically, we have met 99.72% of 4-day turnaround, 99.77% of 48-hour turnaround, and 99.62% of 24-hour turnaround. In the rare case that a file is overdue, we automatically discount to the achieved turnaround level.

Please see the detailed comparison of 3Play Media versus Cielo24.

Please see the detailed comparison of 3Play Media versus Rev.

Please see the detailed comparison of 3Play Media versus CaptionSync (AST).

Please see the detailed comparison of 3Play Media versus Verbit.

3Play acquired Captionmax along with NCC in February 2022. 3Play and Captionmax have shared values and complementary strengths. This is an exciting event that should result in a broader set of capabilities to serve our customers better than ever. The media landscape is changing quickly, and as a leader, we strive to stay at the forefront. This combination will allow us to accelerate our product capabilities and overall ability to provide customers with a complete suite of tools, driving ultimate peace of mind. This is consistent with our commitment to providing the best set of tools and services for customers who require premium solutions for video accessibility. For 3Play, this is also an opportunity to add immediate scale and reliability to our new live captioning solution. Learn more about the acquisition.

3Play Media is your trusted accessibility partner with 10+ years of innovation and the only true 99% accuracy rate in the industry. We take our customers’ happiness and success seriously! Learn more about the 3Play Difference.

Volume pricing is available with the Pro and Enterprise plans.

You can either pay by credit card or get an invoice.

A contract is not required, and you only pay for what you use.

No, these features are always included.

Plugins are included with the Enterprise plan.

No, our price includes both captions and transcripts in over 50 different output formats.

Yes, we treat audio and video files the same way.

The Express plan has no minimum. The Enterprise plan has a minimum initial commitment.

There is a 1-minute minimum. After that, you pay for the exact duration of each file.

We support most video/audio formats that don’t use a proprietary codec.

You will be able to download caption and transcript files in over 50 different formats. The format you need depends on the player or platform you are using to publish your video. If you need the captions embedded into the video itself, you can order open captions or encoded captions.

We have six different turnaround options, ranging from 2 hours to 10 days. You can select turnaround when you submit the video/audio files.

Our secure, cloud-based, multi-platform account system provides numerous capabilities for uploading and monitoring job status, downloading captions/transcripts/audio descriptions, and editing output files. The system is flexible and supports large organizations with numerous groups and users. It allows for various billing, operational, and reporting requirements.

No, everything is web-based and cross-platform compatible.

We offer personalized support during the implementation period and anytime thereafter. This includes training of the account system and help setting up integrations. Online support is available 24/7. Phone support is available between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM ET for Enterprise plan customers. We provide a library of video tutorials, how-to guides, and help articles.

Together, we will have a widely enhanced shared set of resources and services to offer. Potential customers should anticipate new service offerings, increased capacity and scale, and a true full service video accessibility solution.

Security and privacy are a critical part of our business and we offer a HIPAA compliant workflow. We have passed rigorous security audits and all of our staff are bound by confidentiality agreements. We provide secure control over data and user access.

We excel at captioning videos with technical or academic content, diverse speakers, heavy accents, background noise, overlapping voices, and poor audio quality. We have developed numerous technologies and trained our staff to achieve the best possible quality and accuracy under all circumstances.

We adhere to DCMP best practices for speaker identification, sound effects and non-speech elements, tone, caption formatting, grammar, and line breaks. We also adhere to a strict set of transcription standards that covers paragraphing, inaudible tags, treatment of technical terminology, word synchronization, false starts, filler words, broken sentences, interruptions, handling poor audio quality, accents, and overlapping voices, general numbers, lists and ranges, roman numerals, percentages/decimals/fractions, currency, ordinal place, scores, websites, telephone numbers, punctuation, capitalization, dates and times, onomatopoeias, abbreviations, acronyms, and quotations.

No. Many vendors chop up each video into micro segments that are split up among numerous transcriptionists. This creates inconsistencies and quality issues. We use a single transcriptionist to work on a file from beginning to end. This ensures that the transcriptionist has the full context of the content to better identify proper nouns and that the transcript contains completely consistent standards and spellings.

All 3Play Media audio describers go through a rigorous certification process, just like our transcriptionists. Our describers follow DCMP description key guidelines and best practices for prioritizing what to describe, how to describe, and when to describe the visuals in your content.

Our transcriptionists are a critical part of our process at 3Play Media, and are treated as such. All transcriptionists go through a rigorous certification process. They are unique individuals who are detail-oriented, have a strong grasp of English grammar, and are eager to help your content be the best and most accessible it can be.

Yes, as you process content, our system automatically learns the correct spelling of terminology, proper names, and words specific to your business. This significantly reduces errors over time.

Yes, you can submit a cheat sheet with specialized vocabulary, acronyms, names, or places. This helps our transcriptionists to decipher the spoken words.

While our 99.6% accuracy output is considered very high quality, it is not perfect. 99.6% accuracy leaves up to 0.4% error, which means that a 10-minute file with 1,500 words could have up to 6 errors. If a word contains a typo or is misspelled, that counts as one error. Our standard process aims to transcribe all content exactly as it is spoken, including false starts, while omitting certain unnecessary utterances, such as “um” and “uh”.

If you need a flawless transcript, we offer a full review option. This typically increases accuracy to 99.9%. Another option is to review and edit the files yourself, using the caption editor.