Live Captioning for YouTube

Adding real-time/live captions to your YouTube events is easy with CaptionSync. In this article, we describe how hosts can provide real-time captions on YouTube.

Requesting Live Captioning:

• To request Live Captioning for your event, log into your CaptionSync account and follow the instructions in our Live Captioning tutorial on how to schedule and choose the appropriate service.

• Add the YouTube link to the event next to Audio Source, and provide any additional information in the Comments section.

If you need to obtain a StreamText URL for your event, as a backup live stream for example, please add that request to the Comments section. E.g.: Please provide StreamText link.

Once the Live Captioning request is booked, you'll receive a confirmation email from our live@automaticsync.com address with the captioner's information and other details.

Note: If you need to make changes or cancel your existing request, you can do so from within the respective Live Captioning Details page, in your CaptionSync account. But, if you need to contact the captioner just before the session starts, or for urgent changes to the audio source information, please use the captioner's contact information provided in the confirmation email.

Providing real-time captions on YouTube:

YouTube supports closed captions natively. To enable captions on the live stream, complete the following steps on your YouTube account, and then send us the Caption Ingestion URL, before the event starts (preferably, make it available at schedule time, in the Comments section of the request page):

• Create your Event as you normally would. You must be using the YouTube Live platform.
• After creating the event, be sure to add any necessary delay in the Additional settings tab.
• Ensure you enable the Closed captions, and then select the POST captions to URL.
• Click COPY next to Captions Ingestion URL. This is a signed HTTP URL.
• Provide this URL to us.
• For best results, please ensure that your system’s clock is accurate.

NOTE: There is a significant delay of at least 15 seconds built into YouTube Live and captions will typically display far behind the video. This means that in order to get the captions to align with the video you'll need to provide us with a direct audio source instead, like dial-in, conference call, Skype or Zoom call, etc. You might still need to add some delay in the YouTube event settings, and so we would recommend making a test request before the actual event, in order to test different values and get captions to align correctly.

Viewing captions:

On the day of the event, there will be a CC button on the YouTube player and any viewer can click it and watch the live captions.

Additional Notes:

• You can also provide captions for YouTube events using StreamText, if you prefer that the captions are not available natively on the player. See how the StreamText feed can be accessed by users as a single web page.

• Once the session has concluded, we will automatically email you a text transcript, in the next 24 hours, to the address we have on file for your account. The transcript will also be available for download from within the Details page of your Live Captioning request, next to Transcript.

• Additionally, you can order a caption output for your session, in the .srt or .vtt format, from the Request drop-down menu, in the New Live Captioning Request page, at schedule time. If you have ordered a caption output, it will be emailed separately from our live@automaticsync.com address, in the following 24 hours. Note that, generating a caption output is a service with an extra cost.