Adding subtitles to your video for closed-captioning is not only a way to support your audience with hearing disabilities, but in YouTube it improves your search results when looking for that specific video. As we know, video itself cannot be indexed (yet) so YouTube indexes subtitles, as well as your description, name of the video, comments, etc. for more accurate results through search engine optimization (SEO).  Google provides some direction on how to add subtitles, but they don’t perform a thorough walkthrough and leave much to be assumed if you’re uploading subtitles without time codes.  Here I walkthrough you through the process and provide some examples for your assistance.

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Limelight: http://www.limelightvideoplatform.com

In 2010, Limelight acquired Delve Networks, and with that acquisition came an OVP (now known as their LVP – Limelight Video Platform) whose content manager platform has been described as, “Apple in front, and Google under the hood.”  As I mentioned in my earlier post when covering Streaming Media East, Limelight was certainly one of the sexier, more colorful exhibits because of its flashy platform.  I wasted no time speaking with a Solutions Engineer and we got into talking about Delve, some of its 100+ customers, and how it has kept most of its personality since the $10 million acquisition last summer.

Such an acquisition is a natural fit for a Content Delivery Network such as Limelight, however they still continue to offer Akamai as an alternative CDN provider for their existing customers (couldn’t find out if new customers have Akamai as an option).  They offer many of the standard OVP options like on-demand and live-streaming (though live-streaming is not available for all accounts and needs to be enabled by contacting Limelight), metadata management, customized players, and playlists (also called Channels).  And, like many of their OVP competitors, Limelight offers a 30-day trial of their platform that will give you access to upload, publish, and analyze the results of your video content.  The following is another OVP overview based on the vendor’s 30-day trial.

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Since my first job as a New Media Producer in 1999, I have done boatloads of reading about online audio and video, particularly in the webcasting space, and watched companies surface and sink in the process.  I still work for a company with the leading Corporate Communications and Investor Relations webcast business around the globe, though I haven’t done a competitive analysis to really dig deep under the skin of the latest providers and search for facts…until now.  We have our own OVP just newly released, so its important to really understand the landscape and who we’re up against. This blog entry is the first of several to document my findings and experiences along the way while I write my competitive analysis, to achieve 20/20 vision over the webcasting and multimedia landscape.  For starters, we’ll narrow the scope and start with Online Video Providers (OVP), which are the hottest trend going right now in the multimedia space for self-service editing, hosting, and broadcasting content over the web.

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