Amara’s Collaborative Subtitling Platform Adopted by the World’s Leading Online Education Providers to Go Global: Udacity, Khan Academy, Coursera, TED Ed, and more.
NEW YORK – Udacity, one of the leading online education portals today launched a student-driven volunteer team with Amara to caption and translate more than 5,000 educational videos. The move allows Udacity to reach a global audience and to deepen their engage with their rapidly growing user-base.
“The online education space has emerged as the production and consumption of online video has exploded,” said Nicholas Reville, CEO of Amara. “Video is the central medium that allows online education to flourish globally. But video is harder and more expensive to translate and is not as searchable as text. That’s where Amara comes in.”
Amara’s radical new crowdsourced approach to subtitling– a ‘Wikipedia for subtitles’ — allows video makers to breakdown political, social and cultural barriers to reach a vastly wider audience.
“We believe education is a basic human right,” said Sebastian Thrun, CEO/Co-Founder of Udacity. “We have a passionate and growing international student community. We hope that by engaging our users with Amara’s platform, we can make our content more accessible by adapting to our international population’s languages. That is ultimately the core purpose of Udacity. We want to democratize education by broadening access and delivery of high quality university learning and content.”
With free online courses in Computer Science, Programming, Mathematics, General Science and Entrepreneurship, Udacity has over 700,000 users and an innovative revenue model that includes both certification for completed courses as well as job referral services. The company has more than 5,500 videos online and 90% have at least one subtitle, while the most popular ones are translated in more than 10 languages. The Colombian Ministry of IT and Innovation recently announced plans to translate Udacity’s Entrepreneurship course — How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad — into Spanish, with several other partners in Russia, Japan, and France also in the works.
Since Amara’s launch in 2010, more than 68,000 users have subtitled more than 200,000 videos across over 100 different languages. For example, Amara volunteers subtitled the KONY 2012 video in 30 languages in just two days. TED translates every TED talk into more than 40 languages using Amara, with a volunteer community of more than 11,000 volunteers. Amara’s enterprise platform costs about 95% less than traditional subtitling services.
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About Amara
By partnering with organizations such as, PBS, TED Talks and Netflix, Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. Amara’s technology offers a robust API that allows companies to use the platform for internal collaboration as well as allowing individual customers to translate video content. Backed by a million dollars in funding from the Knight Foundation and Mozilla, Amara’s award-winning platform has been recognized by the Federal Communications Commission, the United Nations and TechAwards. For more information, visit universalsubtitles.org and follow @AmaraSubs on Twitter.
Media Contact:
Josh Segall
joshua.segall@amara.org
(334) 328-9184