Facebook Live Videos Now Support Closed Captions for Publishers
Facebook's latest improvement to its video platform is making live videos more accessible. In good news for the hearing impaired community, Facebook announced that publishers can now add closed captions to their live videos. The social network's on-demand videos already support captioning. Viewers who have captioning selected in their settings will automatically see live video captions when they're available.
Live video is taking off on Facebook where one in every five videos is a live stream, the company notes in a blog post.
Publishers who use Facebook's Live API will need to add CEA-608 captions to their streams to enable the ability. Alternatively, publishers can work with third-party captioning companies to create captions and enter them into the live stream in real-time. Facebook notes that it tested this ability in April during its F8 developers conference, where partner Ai-Media created live captions.
"We’re excited to allow publishers of all kinds to reach a broader audience with closed captions in Facebook Live," writes Facebook product manager Supratik Lahiri. "More video is being shared and watched on Facebook than ever before, and live video has become one of the most engaging forms of content on Facebook."
The live captions will display for both desktop and mobile viewers.
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