Adding value for Mobile World Live TV

More than 107,000 people from 205 countries around the world convened in Barcelona for the 2018 GSMA Mobile World Congress, where more than 2,400 exhibitors showcased the latest and greatest in mobile technology at Fira Gran Via.

For Ericsson, the Mobile World Congress is the biggest event of the year. It’s also very important to us in Access Services at Red Bee Media, as for the last four years, we’ve spent the week providing captions for the Mobile World Live TV broadcast to ensure that the attendees don’t miss a thing. This year we captioned 44 hours remotely via our global English language team and our cloud-based live captioning platform, with captions viewed on over 70 monitors strategically located around the event.

Live captioning at events like the Mobile World Congress means that audiences can have full access to content, which is often being viewed in very busy and noisy environments, silent screens, monitors around a venue, streamed into their hotel rooms or on their mobile devices. It is also an incredibly valuable support for international events in English, where often there are many speakers and attendees who are non-native speakers.

But at such an event, improved access to content and messages at the venue is only the starting point in unlocking the tons of added value captioning brings.

Captions are data and can massively increase the reach of media during and after an event. A caption file is essentially a timed transcript of your content and as such, it is valuable indeed. It can help with indexing of online content and increase search traffic and engagement. It can also be used for SEO, recommendation or targeted advertising, keyword extraction, short-form creation or improving access and creating new experiences in on-demand content.

It’s no secret that at Red Bee Media we’re big fans of captioning and we’ve thought for a long time that captions are extremely valuable. They will always allow people to access content which would be inaccessible otherwise, but they are also much, much more than this. As timed-text data, they can be the fuel for engaging audiences, unlocking increased value and surely for creating new media experiences we haven’t even thought of yet.

Let us know what you think in the comments below or drop us a line.

Diana Sánchez, Global Engagement Manager, Access Services