Most of the Super Bowl commercials aren't captioned, so I was thrilled to find out that Project Read On took the time to caption the popular Super Bowl commercials and posted them on their site. Imagine my disappointment to find out that the Etrade commercial with the cute, talking baby wasn't as amusing as it looked without captions. But without Project Read On's captions-- I would have never known!
Project Read On is a company that began in March, 2007 and they captions videos and online media. Intrigued, I had to find out more. I contacted Project Read On, and one of the owners, Mateo Gutierrez promptly responded with an email. We set up a time to chat via instant messaging so that I could learn more about his company.
Mateo started his career in the video game business and turned to closed captioning in 2004. "I started a company in Los Angeles with my two business partners to provide the service for television networks primarily," said Mateo. "I'm a big fan of the concept of businesses that can do great things and profit. I believe very much in Muhammand Yusun's philosophy of doing business and make it part of my practice to empower people."
The Project Read On company evolved from their experience of providing closed captioning for TV stations when the owners saw the emergence of YouTube and videos on the web and noted that deaf and hard of hearing individuals were not able to access the online media. Using the money they earned from captioning other projects, the owners formed Project Read On and began their quest to provide captioning access. They evaluate their captioning projects in a variety of ways--from requests that are made through their website to partnering with businesses who want their online videos captioned. The owners will also go ahead and take on projects that they find interesting and put in long hours to make it accessible via captions.
We owe it to our community to succeed," said Mateo. "Millions upon millions of dollars are spent every year 'analyzing' how to get online content captioned, meanwhile we just want to get out there and do it. It's not rocket science and we shouldn't have to legislate to get it done. We fully support the Google mind-set, power to the people, open ended, fair, shared technology and we are totally committed to getting our service everywhere we can so everyone can take advantage of online content and all that it offers."
