Technology provider RAMP is announcing this morning that ABCNews.com and CNBC.com are now using its web closed captioning solution, and that it has made a number of enhancements in order to better meet the needs of customers. For those not familiar with web closed captioning, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act signed in Oct. 2010 mandates that by the end of 2012, all video originally aired on broadcast or cable TV networks, which is then delivered online, must include closed captions.

As RAMP's CEO Tom Wilde explained to me last week, the act has created huge new challenges for TV networks because when captioned on-air video is passed from the broadcast team to the digital team for online delivery, there's no adequate workflow to keep the caption file in synch with the video. The situation becomes even more complicated when a full-length video is sliced up into shorter online-only clips.

Now, with RAMP's MediaCloud solution, the original broadcast caption file can be captured, time-stamped and converted to popular web caption standards. For clips, MediaCloud will use its automated text alignment ("ATA") technology to match the clip to the appropriate caption segment. Even in situations where there's no caption data at all, RAMP's team can create time-coded transcripts. Tom believes RAMP is the first to address all three of these scenarios in one solution, noting that speech-to-text technology alone isn't sufficient to comply with the act's requirements (there's a white paper here, explaining more).

It turns out that all of this new mandated work actually has business benefits as well. As Tom explained, for customers that have been using its captioning solution, their videos' completion rates have increased by 65% and their engagement (as measured by stream starts per session) has increased by 70%. That's because the captions give viewers the ability to search within videos, so they're able to find exactly the content they want. As a result, it looks like mandated web captioning for TV networks may turn into an example of "doing well by doing good."