Member Article

Gateshead man launches world's first web based subtitling company

A Gateshead entrepreneur has launched the world’s first specialist web-video subtitle service.

The Internet subtitles makes web-videos more accessible, and the technology also means that video content will be searchable through Google.

Rob Colling, 35, launched internetsubtitling.com after 10 years in movie and TV subtitling, after working on films like Pirates of the Caribbean, the Bourne trilogy and 17 James Bond films.

Rob said: “Nine million people in the UK and 35 million in the US have a hearing impairment. If you have a website, that’s around one in seven of your audience who may not be able to understand what’s going on in your web videos.

“And that’s not all. Think about all the other viewers who need to watch without sound. Maybe they’re in an office, an internet café or a library, or maybe they’re in a really noisy environment like an airport, a school or a train station.

“That’s a heck of a lot of viewers to miss out on. By adding captions, or subtitles for foreign language speakers, you open up your clips to millions more people. Given these figures, captions should be near the top of most website managers’ wish lists.”

It will cost £10 per minute of footage, a price Rob hopes will appeal to schools, health trusts, charities and local and national governmental bodies.

Rob added: “Internetsubtitling.com only deals with web video, so we can keep our overheads extremely low, we have a very short lead time and our services are very affordable.

“At the moment we’re a uniquely low-cost provider in a very expensive industry. Even though the quality of our work is amongst the highest anywhere in the world, it’s our prices which people are really talking about because nobody else is rivalling us.

“That’s crazy – there should be hundreds of companies doing what we do, otherwise we’re never going to caption and subtitle more than a fraction of the world’s web video.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .