Preliminary research shows that the market size for closed captioning is behind paywalls. Further research will be necessary to triangulate the market size, possibly by using revenues for companies in the space.
MARKET SIZE
- Closed captioning is part of the post production services industry, which is estimated to be worth $8 billion in the U.S. in 2019.
- In 2017, YouTube announced that 1 billion videos on the platform included closed captioning.
TRENDS
VIDEO CONTENT IS INCREASING
- Video is growing exponentially, and "more video content is uploaded to the web in 1 month than TV has created in 3 decades."
- Additionally, 78% of people watch online videos every week.
- In 2017, video accounted for 74% of all online traffic and this is expected to grow to 80% in 2019.
- About 70% of people who publish videos to YouTube say they are captioning them compared to just 20% of people who publish videos to Facebook.
- Viewers prefer that videos do not autoplay with sound, with 80% of viewers reacting "negatively to videos autoplaying with sound."
- Moreover, 41% of videos are incomprehensible without captioning.
AUTOMATED CAPTIONING
- There has been an increase in automated captioning that is attributed to "the need for an affordable option for rapidly captioning large amounts of content, as well as increased publishing on social media platforms (many of which provide automatic captioning tools)."
- In 2018, 17% of people who publish video content on social media are also using automated captioning.
- The increasing amount of content that companies publish is driving the need for an automated captioning option.
- In addition, automated captions are "cheaper and faster to produce than captions outsourced to a professional vendor."
- Legal compliance is another driver of automated captioning, as 15% of people using automated captions cite legal compliance as a reason.
- However, automated captioning solutions are only 90% accurate at best.