Week 11

Business outline

How can you ensure a business / creative idea is targeted and researched to maximise potential?

Research on my potential customers/audience

I wanted to start my research by looking at the statistics from hearinglink.org – how many people are actually deaf or suffering from hearing loss in the UK? Turns out this is 1 in 6 – that’s really quite high. Action on hearing loss also claims that around 50,000 children have hearing loss in the UK – around half are born with it and the other half lose it during childhood.
I have taken the most important facts from uscreen (in my opinion) that are relevant to my idea. These statistics show that there is more success with transcribed videos than no transcription and viewers are far more engaged with the audio content.

These are some powerful figures that I have found and if anything, just reinforces the reason behind making subtitles made an easily accessible option for anyone who needs them.

What exists?

Opensubtitles.org – a huge database of subtitles but there have been reports that it’s full of malicious malware as it’s technically a free online streaming site for films and tv programmes that runs off advertising (whether this is good or bad i.e. a virus)

Android and Apple apps such as Subcake, SubE, Add Subtitles, and Mix Captions, all apply captions to your personal videos but there seems to be no option to apply them to content you view on social media, the internet, television etc. It’s making me think about smart TV’s too and how they now integrate apps into their system – why isn’t there an app for the tv?… Sub viewer (Apple app) actually uses opensubtitles.org (above) as their database… Begs the question how safe is that to use!?

There’s also various sites out there that provide different methods of applying subtitles to anything you want to upload. I really think there is a gap in the market for having a subtitle service that covers multiple platforms.

Interesting document for BBC subtitle guidelines I’ve found online – will I consider any of these in my final idea and why/why not? Can I challenge any of these (for instance the colours?).

Subtitling services such as Matinee charge by amount of time that needs to be translated – they also charge per document, by the amount of people reviewing the subs and whether there is one language or more. This is food for thought with my concept – as I would want to offer different packages I could use some differentiators like Manitee have done, to determine what a customer will get for their money.

To consider for my final idea – alongside collaboration with TV / online companies I could offer a bespoke service. This would enable me to have a pricing strategy for side businesses or other projects – such as education for instance. There could be videos (thinking about falmouth flexible – there are videos each week) which require transcriptions and the university / school may want content transcribed at any given time during the academic year.

Report

I drafted out my text first, and made sure I had that in place before adding my illustration below. Printing it and writing on it makes it easier for me to see what’s out of place as opposed to on the screen (with all of indesigns guides).

Using photographs of hearing aids as a reference (my own included) portrays my subject matter. I have used illustrations of sign language for two reasons – a) some of my target audience would involve people who are deaf and use sign language to communicate, and b) I was taught the sign language alphabet in primary school and it stayed with me, and I always wanted to learn more. So this year I took sign classes and learnt how to sign sentences and basic communication like time, weather, mood:

However with sign language even if you only know the alphabet you would be able to spell out words as they are the same as english lettering (as the above picture shows, taken from British Sign) – I felt it would be really beneficial to use illustrations of the alphabet in my branding. There isn’t a reason why I chose the signed letters of ‘b’, ‘l’ and ‘u’ – it was simply the letters I found that differentiated in hand/finger compositions.

The branding is colourful as I felt it should represent what the service would enable my customer to do. I have chosen red and pale green – as I am interested in colour theory I looked into this and red is often associated with importance, courage and power, whilst green is known in the medical world as being a healing colour. I thought these colours contrast well not just in appearance but in meaning – one is energising (red) whilst the other is calming (green). I definitely see my service as important and therefore catching a viewers attention, but at the same time bringing a peace of mind to someone who has difficulty understanding audio.

Next steps:

• Look at pricing packages as this will determine how I would categorise/define my concept to my audience and WHY. I haven’t mentioned it on the brief report this week but feel this would be important for a final project pack / pitch.
• Explore how my captions would work and the way-finding of the app online / on a TV.
• I have made the coloured subtitles but so far they look very similar to ordinary subs, except colourful. I need to explore how I can make them more exciting and playful.

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