May 2020 - Streaming Video Blog

Digital Hub Logistics Hamburg Case Study

Written by Anthony Romero in Customer Stories on 27 May 2020

Pivoting in-person events to digital experiences in three weeks time

COVID-19 caused companies to pivot toward new digital solutions to do business. These practices are ones that must stand up to remote working and restrictions on travel and lockdown facilities.

What do you do, though, when your organization focuses on community and building a strong network of companies through in-person events?

For Digital Hub Logistics Hamburg, they innovated by adopting a digital strategy through technology from IBM. This was done with an eye on speed: quickly being able to introduce video streaming to their community to keep them engaged from earlier events while reaping success through greatly expanding their reach.

WebVTT Captioning & Subtitle Support

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 26 May 2020

Looking to add closed captions or subtitles to your video content? Need WebVTT captioning support?

While closed captions can be associated with aiding the deaf and those hard of hearing, their benefit goes beyond this for video creators. In this article, learn about captions, why you should be investing in them and how viewing habits are changing in a way that increases their use. Also learn about the WebVTT format for subtitles and caption, how to create them and convert other subtitle formats to them as well. This is topped off with discussing how to add captions to your videos on IBM’s video streaming and enterprise video platform.

Convert Video Speech to Text with Watson

Written by Anthony Romero in Product Updates on 22 May 2020

Closed captions have grown to be an important part of the video experience. While they assist deaf and hard of hearing people in enjoying video content, a study in the UK discovered that 80% of closed caption use was from those with no hearing issues. Not only that, but Facebook found out that adding captions to a video increased view times on their network by 12%. These reasons, along with regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and rules from the FCC, have realized the need to caption video assets. However, caption generation can be time consuming, taking 5-10 times the length of the video asset, or costly if you are paying someone else to create them.

A solution is automatic speech recognition from machine learning. This the ability to identify words and phrases in spoken language and convert them to text. The process offers content owners a way to quickly and cost effectively provide captions for their videos. To address this, IBM introduced the ability to convert video speech to text through IBM Watson. This was added to IBM’s video streaming solutions in late 2017 for VODs (video on-demand). It has recently been expanded to recognize additional languages.

Integrated live captioning for enterprises is also available, although differs in several ways from the VOD feature talked about here.

Benefits of Live Streaming Webex Meetings to Large Audiences

Written by Chris Zaloumis in Tips & Tutorials on 15 May 2020

Looking to stream to a large audience but want to use a familiar program? Are you looking to have event presenters use Webex from home? Have you exceeded your limit on the number of people who can connect to your Webex session?

Through an integration between IBM and Cisco, Webex Meetings or Events can be used to reliably live stream to massive audiences. This includes a host of benefits, from ease-of-use to AI-driven features, and is currently part of an extended free access trial due to the current global crisis.