Known as an easy-to-use video hosting platform made for B2B marketers, Wistia is a great tool for business owners to improve your marketing, build your brand, and tell your stories to your audiences. With Wistia, small to medium businesses can leverage videos and even podcasts to reach the right people and engage with a community.
If you’re deciding on investing in videos on this platform, you want to make sure you’re maximizing your exposure and the various features Wistia has to offer. In other words, closed captioning for your Wistia videos is definitely a must. Not only do captions make things easier for your audience to consume your media, but they also help optimize your brand and video content.
Here’s how you can turn on and add closed captioning on Wistia:
Manually uploading your own captions
One way you can add closed captions to your videos on Wistia is by uploading your own. You can either choose to manually transcribe your video and format the .srt file to be uploaded. Or you can also use a free transcription service that will save you some time transcribing for the Wistia closed captioning. After that, all you need to do is format it and save it as an .srt file.
Follow these steps to upload your own captions:
- Head to the media page (the page where you can play the media in your Wistia account) and select the video you’d like to put captions on.
- Once there, select the Customize panel.
- Select Captions and enable it to turn on the captions for your media.
- The next thing you want to do is click on the Upload .srt file.
- Locate the .srt file from your files and upload. You can also add multiple .srt files in different languages as much as you want.
Once done, the closed captions button [CC] will appear on your media for all audiences.
Ordering captions from Wistia
If you don’t have time to manually transcribe, you can also get paid captions for your media from Wistia itself. Please note that ordering captions is only available for accounts with a paid Wistia plan. Free accounts cannot request captions as of the moment.
If you have this capability and you want this option, here’s how:
- Head to the media page (the page where you can play the media in your Wistia account) and select the video you’d like to put captions on.
- Once there, select the Customize panel.
- Select Captions and enable it to turn on the captions for your media.
- Instead of clicking on the Upload .srt file, click on Order .srt file.
- Choose between human-generated professional captions or automated captions. Pricing depends on the length of the video, and if you want to receive it in one business day or four business days.
Once done, you will receive an email about your completed captions.
Adding closed captions to your Wistia videos is fairly easy, and cheap if you know certain tools and resources that can help you. This simple act can go a long way and will benefit you, your brand or business, and your audiences.