How Ten Percent Happier Makes Meditation Accessible with Closed Captions

The Situation

 
Ten Percent Happier is a mindfulness and meditation company that produces a combination of video and audio courses centered around wellness that users access through the app. The courses include videos with a single person or with guests, followed by a relevant meditation.

The videos are typically short-form and can be educational, instructional, and entertaining. Once a user completes the video-based talk, they follow it up with a meditation which is guided with a simple, straightforward approach.

Before the company started making their content accessible, Ten Percent Happier was looking for an accessibility partner who could help them efficiently caption their video and audio content.

They publish at least one new meditation and two talks per week. On a quarterly basis, they publish a new wellness course or challenge that consists of anywhere between 7-30 videos and accompanying audio-only guided meditations.

As much as the company wanted to find an accessibility solution, they were initially worried about the captioning process. Some concerns were ease of use, workflow, and price.

As a small startup, Ten Percent Happier was resource-limited and only had the capacity to manage so much. Adding a difficult workflow to an already complicated publishing process was a daunting task. However, when the wellness company discovered 3Play Media and our seamless integrations, it made the decision process simple.

The Approach

 
Most of Ten Percent Happier’s media content lives on its app for people to access through their mobile devices. In order to make their content accessible to more users, in particular the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, the company had decided early on to invest in captioning. They caption both the videos and guided meditations related to their courses.

When looking for a captioning vendor, Ten Percent Happier needed a solution that seamlessly integrated with their video player, Brightcove. They simply requested captions in the 3Play Account System, chose their turnaround time, and the captions posted back to the content in Brightcove. As soon as the captions were in Brightcove, they would immediately be available to any user watching or listening.

Once the files were submitted, 3Play handled everything in the backend. They never needed to go back to check. They’ve done it enough times now that as soon as they submit a file, they know it’s going to come back accurately, on time, and automatically uploaded to their content.

On top of the integration, they chose 3Play Media as their captioning vendor because we were competitively priced. To Ten Percent Happier, it was a win-win situation to have an intuitive solution that didn’t break the bank.

The Results

 
As its community grew, Ten Percent Happier started to attract more d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing members who now had a way to consume the content.

With the seamless and intuitive integration with Brightcove, Ten Percent Happier can launch new courses, products, and meditations, and have captioning as an offering for their users.

When Ten Percent Happier found 3Play Media, they discovered how easy the workflow would be. They went from wanting to caption to efficiently captioning their content and making it accessible to all of their users.

Once Ten Percent Happier shared that they’d be captioning all of their content with their community, it was very well-received, especially considering that many members had requested for captions. Ten Percent Happier discovered that it was less of a business or a financial decision and more of an opportunity to give everyone access to valuable content.

Now that Ten Percent Happier has committed to captioning all of their content, they’ve automatically included it into their production costs, making the budgeting process simple.

Since captioning their content, Ten Percent Happier sees about 10,000 meditators per week who enable captions.