About
Kaltura REACH provides human and automatic captions, transcription, translation, and enrichment services like audio description, chaptering, metadata extraction, and enhanced search capabilities.
By improving accessibility and inclusivity, REACH ensures everyone can engage with video content - whether for better understanding, watching on mute, or consuming media in a second language.
To set up REACH on your account, contact your Kaltura representative.
Benefits of REACH
✔ Easy management and control - One centralized services dashboard allows you to easily manage your budget and track requests. Visit our article Moderating Services Requests and General Statistics for more information.
✔ Customizable and automated processes - Kaltura REACH includes a full end-to-end process for caption ordering and return. Ordering rules, moderation, flexible permissions and so on can be tailored to your needs. See Reach Profiles and Services for more information.
✔ Unified solution - The workflow is the same across all Kaltura's applications, so it doesn't matter whether your in MediaSpace, the KMC or one of our KAF integrations. Also the experience and flow is the same whether your video was created in Kaltura or not - once it's uploaded, your video benefits from the same ease of use of our captions editor and automatic transcript widget.
✔ Reports - You have the option to obtain usage and billing reports, and you can also download the relevant information.
✔ Compliance with security and privacy - Customers can request that the service provider delete their content once the captions have been completed, or alternatively, they can specify a desired timeframe during which the content will be retained before deletion.
✔ DPA (Data processing agreement) & GDPR compliant.
Services
Kaltura REACH services include:
For a list of common terms related to creating caption and enrichment requests in Kaltura, see our article REACH terminology.
Captioning
Machine (ASR) - This AI-based service provides quick, searchable video transcripts with an average 85% accuracy and a turnaround time of up to two hours. Users can edit the transcript and resubmit for alignment. The engine improves over time, and custom vocabularies can be added for industry-specific terms. Recommended primarily for search and discovery, not as on-player captions.
Top use cases for machine captioning:
- Immediate transcripts needed within minutes of upload (for example, call centers)
- Consistent speakers, such as university faculty
- Language with specialized terms, idioms, or domain-specific vocabulary
- Clear speaker audio without background noise
Please note that captions are not the same as translations (subtitles). They provide text for the spoken dialogue in the same language as the video.
Professional - This is a service that leverages professional human transcribers to provide full-service captioning with 99% accuracy. Additionally, the captions will be fully compliant with the high standard Closed Captions laws, as well as media publishing expectations. Turnaround time varies from 3 hours to 48 hours to 'best effort'. It's recommended to use this service for your public-facing, external videos, including marketing, learning, and training.
Top use cases for professional captioning:
- Accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Support for reading and literacy challenges
- Expanding reach to multilingual viewers
- Interactive transcript experience
- Closed captions for TV and media compliance
Visit our article Ordering Captions for ordering information.
Translation
The process for creating translations involves two steps:
Step 1: Ordering professional captions - Start by ordering professional captions in the video’s spoken language (source language). This ensures captions meet 99%+ accuracy for quality translation. You can also add notes for the translator.
Step 2: Ordering machine translations - After the professional captions are delivered, order machine translations.
If you already have your own captions file (SRT, DFXP, XML) in the source language, you can start directly with Step 2. It’s essential, however, that the source captions are 99% accurate. To achieve this, you can manually edit the machine-generated captions to reach this accuracy level before proceeding with translation.
Visit Order translations for ordering information.
Audio description
Audio Description and Advanced Audio Description enhance accessibility for individuals who are blind, have low vision, or are visually impaired.
Audio Description - This service combines the original video audio with spoken narration of key visual elements like actions, text, and scenes. It is provided in English with a turnaround time of 24 hours to 5 days.
Visit Audio Description for ordering information.
Advanced Audio Description - Similar to standard Audio Description, this service includes spoken narration of visual elements but allows the video to be paused to provide more detailed descriptions when needed.
Chaptering
This is an AI-based video service that creates chapters for a video. The chapters are reviewed by professionals and added as content metadata, just like creating manual chapters. The service is available in English only; the turnaround time is 24 hours.
Visit Order captions and enrichment services for media for ordering information.
Alignment
Alignment services convert a text file to captions.
Visit Order captions alignment based on a transcript file for ordering information.
Dubbing
Multiple languages are available; human-based, supports up to 20-minute long videos.
Live captioning
The Live Captions service includes Machine Generated Live Captions. This service is currently available only in the English language, additional languages will be added later.
Visit Live captions for ordering information.
Transcript widget
The Transcript widget shows the captions during playback. In the transcription playback mode, you can fast-forward or fast-rewind to search for a particular point in the video.
Visit Transcript for more information.
FAQs
What languages can I order captions in?
Currently captions can be ordered in more than 13 languages including; Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Dutch. Additional languages available upon request. For more information about supported languages, please see our article Terminology REACH.
Can captioning services be used to create translated subtitles?
No. Captioning services provide text in the same language as the video's spoken language. They cannot be used to create translations or subtitles in other languages. For translations, please refer to our article Order translations.
Do I have to pay separately for each language or are the non-English package(s) all-inclusive?
To determine pricing for captioning your media in more than one additional language, please contact your Kaltura representative.
Can I edit captions I uploaded (not generated by REACH)?
Yes. Kaltura's caption editor supports all captions, created by REACH or uploaded by the customer.
What are credits?
Credits are dollars (or the name of your local currency). Credit is set in your REACH profile and every customer can have one or many profiles.
If I want English and non-English services, do I need to purchase more than one package?
For information on pricing and packages for both English and Non-English captioning and language services, please contact your Kaltura representative.
Why should I caption my media?
Kaltura REACH captions give you a complete textual database of your video library. The index, caption, and transcript data created for your media extends audience reach and enables your content to be searchable.
How do I enable Reach?
Your Kaltura representative will enable Reach on your account, after which your administrator can enable and configure the module. For assistance with setup, please contact your Kaltura representative.
For common terms used for creating caption and translation requests from Kaltura, please see our article Terminology REACH.
