Premium and Enterprise members can enable automated closed captions for their live events during the setup process, allowing your content to be more accessible to your audience.
When you create a recurring event, navigate through the setup process until you get to the Live Preview page, where you can select the Auto CC tab on the left side.
Closed captions will be disabled by default. Click the toggle switch to enable automatic captions for your stream.
The total stream time remaining displayed on this page indicates how long you can have automatic captions active for the duration of your paid membership. The amount granted to you will be refreshed upon membership renewal.
💡Tip: You can toggle Auto CC on and off while your event is live. To conserve caption time allowance, consider toggling it off if there will be long periods of no dialogue during your event.
A Premium membership includes 2 hours of automatic captioning per year. Enterprise members are granted 30 hours of captioning time. Any Enterprise members needing more time should contact their account manager for more options.
If you surpass your limit mid-stream, captions will continue to display until you end your stream. After that, you will no longer be able to use automatic closed captions until your membership renews. If you would like to add more hours of automatic captioning to your Premium membership, contact our team to learn about our Enterprise offerings.
Below the time remaining indicator is the Enhanced speech detection field, where you can enter up to 50 words, separated by commas, that otherwise may not be automatically detected such as people’s names, your business name, or technical jargon that will be spoken during your event. They will populate below the field for easy tracking.
After this, you can continue setting up your event and go live. Captions will be available regardless of how you stream your event (i.e. whether you use the browser-based encoder, Livestream Studio, or any third-party encoder). Auto captions will display regardless if your content is from live cameras or a pre-recorded video. Viewers can see the captions by clicking the [CC] button on the bottom of the player.
⚠️Note: Captions will not appear on the low-res preview player on the live preview page. To view your event with captions, open the event’s page on vimeo.com or your embedded player.
Once your event ends and your stream is archived, the automatic captions are saved with the video. You can access them by navigating to the video’s settings > Distribution > Subtitles. Here you can download the WebVTT file of your captions if needed (i.e. if you want to edit them) and upload a new file as you would for any other video on your account.
Additional notes:
- Automatic closed captions default to English, but also support French (FR), Spanish (SP), German (DE), and Portuguese (BR). You can only select one language to caption per event, but you can change it at any point before or during your stream.
- Currently, automatic closed captions only support the English language. Other languages cannot be captioned.
- If you are simulcasting, the automatic captions on Vimeo will not appear in your other destinations at this time.
A note about simulcasting: If you're simulcasting your event to other destinations, captions generated via the new automatic closed-captioning feature will not appear.