Making Live Comedy Accessible

现场喜剧是出了名的难以接近。场馆通常设在地下室和酒吧上方的小房间里，残疾人通道非常有限。传统上，喜剧场所被认为是“男性”环境，酒精和雄鹿是这种文化的一部分。NextUp在让喜剧变得易懂方面取得了长足的进步；我们是英国现场喜剧的数字家园--一个订阅视频平台和现场喜剧的发行商。我们拥有一个无与伦比的资料库，里面有400多个预先录制的单口喜剧特别节目，可以通过网络和各种应用程序向订阅者提供。除了展示录制的内容，我们最近还扩展到直播喜剧，直接从场所(如伦敦的喜剧商店)，到人们的家。8月，我们成功地完成了一个雄心勃勃的项目，现场直播爱丁堡艺穗节--世界上最大的艺术节。NextUp的工作意味着，无论残疾、照顾责任、距离场地和门票价格如何，人们都能够享受并感受到英国丰富的现场喜剧场景。尽管NextUp是一个相对较小的初创公司，资金有限，但无障碍是我们作为一家企业的关键驱动力之一。我们已经为所有录制的内容添加了隐藏字幕，但我们的直播流目前没有字幕。对于这个项目，我们计划开发一种技术，在直播流发生时对其进行字幕说明--使D/聋人或重听人士能够在直播流通过时享受这些直播流，而不仅仅是我们提供的预先录制的内容。目前，直播在该平台上获得了最高的参与度，因为它们对时间敏感，这会促使观众观看或错过，还因为它们经常由大牌喜剧演员主演。我们的直播技术使喜剧能够从场馆直播到人们家中的电视，这已经是一个巨大的创新，并在喜剧可及性方面取得了长足的进步；这种为这些流添加字幕的创新是这一发展的下一个阶段。

Live comedy is notoriously inaccessible. Venues are often in basements and small rooms above pubs with very limited disabled access. Comedy venues are traditionally thought of as 'male' environments with alcohol and stag-dos being part of the culture. NextUp have made great strides in terms of making comedy accessible; we are the digital home of live comedy in the UK - a subscription video platform and distributor of live comedy. We have an unrivalled library of over 400 pre-recorded standup comedy specials available to subscribers via the web and various apps. As well as showcasing recorded content, we have recently branched into live-streaming comedy direct from venues (such as London's Comedy Store), to people's homes. In August we successfully completed a hugely ambitious project to live-stream the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - the biggest arts festival in the world. NextUp's work means that regardless of disability, caring responsibilities, proximity to the venue and cost of tickets, people are able to enjoy and feel part of the rich live comedy scene in the UK.Despite being a relatively small start up with limited funding, accessibility is one of our key drivers as a business. We have added closed captions to all of our recorded content, however our live-streams are currently not captioned. For this project we plan to develop tech which captions the live streams as they happen - enabling those who are D/deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy the live streams as they come through and not just the pre-recorded content we have on offer. Live streams currently get the highest engagement on the platform because they are time sensitive which drives viewers to watch or 'miss out' and also because they often feature big-name comedians. Our live streaming technology enabling comedy to be streamed live from venues to TVs in people's homes is already hugely innovative, and has made great strides in terms of comedy accessibility; this innovation to caption those streams is the next phase of that development.