Twitter subtitling is the process of using live or recorded tweets from the backchannel to create subtitles for video content. The use of 'twitter subtitling' has mainly been used to enhance the video archive of live events (e.g. television broadcasts, conferences etc.).
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Development History
The concept of combining video and Twitter feeds for recorded events was first proposed Tom Smith in February 2009 after experiencing Graham Linehan's BadMovieClub in which at 9pm exactly on the 13th February 2009, over 2,000 Twitter users simultaneously pressed 'Play' on the film 'The Happening' and continued to 'tweet' whilst watching, creating a collective viewing experience.
Smith, in response, proposed that media such as DVDs and YouTube videos could be enhanced by overlaying asynchronous status updates from other Twitter users who had watched the same media.
Separately, in March 2009 Tony Hirst (Open University), in consultation with Liam Green-Hughes (Open University), presented a practical solution for creating SubRip (*.srt) subtitle files from the Twitter Search API using Yahoo Pipes. The resulting file was then uploaded to a YouTube video allowing users to replay in realtime audio/video with an overlay of status updates from Twitter. Hirst subsequently revisited his original solution creating the simplified Twitter Subtitle web interface for the original Yahoo Pipe
The concept was revisited on the 16th February 2010 by Martin Hawksey (Jisc RSC Scotland North & East) in response to a notification by Hirst made via Twitter during a broadcast of the BBC/OU's The Virtual Revolution series in which Hirst requested information on replaying the #bbcrevolution hashtag in real-time.
Hawksey presented a solution, using Hirst's example from 2009, that created a subtitle file from tweets in W3C Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) which could be used with the BBC iPlayer. Hawksey, following support from Hirst, subsequently extended the Twitter Subtitles Generator tool to include: SubRip (*.srt) creation; and SMIL 3.0 smilText creation and real-time playback.
Development of the Twitter Subtitle Generator has continued with support to directly play embeddable YouTube and Vimeo HTML5 videos and following a suggestion from Hirst the ability to use the Twitter subtitles to navigate within the video timeline.