3Play Media

Universities and media companies that need WCAG-compliant captions plus full transcripts.

3Play Media has run the captioning back-end for major US universities and broadcasters for over a decade. Their platform combines AI first drafts with human cleanup and ships FCC and ADA compliant SRT, DFXP, and VTT files. Not the cheapest, but compliance depth and integration breadth are unmatched.

3Play Media is the default vendor for institutions where captioning is a compliance line item rather than a creative choice. Universities, government media offices, and large broadcasters use them because the platform plugs directly into the video infrastructure they already run, with managed integrations to Brightcove, Kaltura, Zoom, YouTube, and most major video CMS products. That integration depth saves weeks of manual work compared to downloading SRT files and re-uploading them everywhere. The deliverables are the other reason customers pick 3Play. SRT, DFXP, VTT, and broadcast-ready formats all come out of the same pipeline with appropriate metadata, timing precision, and compliance tagging. For ADA, WCAG, and FCC obligations, 3Play handles the spec details so customers don't have to read regulation. Audio description for video, a separate offering, completes the accessibility picture for full-AV content. The trade-off is price. Standard turnaround starts around $2.50 per minute, which is several times what pure-AI ASR costs and roughly comparable to Verbit. For a solo podcaster this is unjustified. For a university media office managing thousands of hours of lecture content, it's the price of compliance and saves more than it costs in operational time. Larger catalogs move to enterprise quotes. Solo podcasters with no compliance obligations should look elsewhere. 3Play is purpose-built for the institutional buyer and prices accordingly.