Ep. 3, S2 - Keeping Up with Consumer Expectations in Government Video

I think it's really interesting that certain parts of why we've had to start doing things like add captions to content are because it's mandated by the government. But a larger part of it is because people's expectations have actually just shifted because of the amount of of change that they've seen in all the other areas where they get video. And I just think that looking at that, looking at how that's happened in the last couple years and and where that might go is is is kinda fascinating. Well and I think you're touching on a change in behavior that speaks to the ubiquity of video in our lives these days and the ubiquity of social media in our lives that we just expect there to be video kind of running in the background of almost everything that we do. This podcast is for city communications teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows, and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Hello, and welcome back to the Government Video Podcast. I'm Michelle Ali Mourani, and I'm your host this week. Today, we're back with Daniel Krawczyk. Daniel is a returning guest with us, and he is the founder and CEO of Municipal Captioning. He works with organizations across the country on their video distribution and content accessibility needs. Welcome back, Daniel. Thanks, Michelle. Happy to be back. Yeah. Thanks for joining us again. Today, we're gonna talk about shifting consumer expectations with shifting expectations on where video should be distributed, what options should be available to viewers on each platform, and even touch on some resistance to platform expansion that we're seeing from some organizations or from a lot of organizations, quite frankly. So so what are your thoughts on that, Daniel? Thanks, Michelle. Yeah. I think it's really interesting that certain certain parts of why we've had to start doing things like add captions to content are because it's mandated by the government. But a larger part of it is because people's expectations have actually just shifted because of the amount of of change that they've seen in all the other areas where they get video. And I just think that looking at that, looking at how that's happened in the last couple years and and where that might go is is is kind of fascinating. For instance, only maybe ten years ago, you wouldn't really expect to see captions on anything that you were gonna try to stream online. There wasn't anything like that with video services other than maybe if you had a DVD with subtitles that you turned on. But the bootleg video community, of course, was making caption files and and and and contributing those when you download a a season of an anime show or something. But these days, for the last maybe, I don't know, five years or six years or so, anything that you would see on Hulu or on Paramount plus or Disney plus or any service is captioned as well as what you see live streamed on on services, like, live events to YouTube. And and and it it it created, I think, an expectation across the market, not even just with young folks or with older folks, but across the market that all video should have something that pops up when you push the little button. Absolutely. And then, obviously, social media, I think, has changed it even more than anything. I mean, you you're on the marketing side, so I know you you end up having to deal with all the different formats now that things go out in of of of Instagram reels and and Facebook stories and and vertical video and and and all this short form video. And and everything again is expected now to have, you know, not just like, you know, kind of closed off captions, but, like, open captions, big visual captions is what's happening now and all all the, you know, the social media side, at least what I see. If you if you watch a video on TikTok, more often than not, can be watched with the sound off and still follow what's happening. Yeah. And and even the added layer of captions sometimes being built into the aesthetic of the video, right, with that It doesn't seem real without it. Yeah. Right. Well and I think you're touching on a change in behavior that speaks to the ubiquity of video in our lives these days and the ubiquity of social media in our lives that we just expect there to be video kind of running in the background of almost everything that we do. And sometimes you're able to engage with the audio of that video and sometimes you're not. And you wanna grab people right away. You know? You want to let them know what that content is about. And I can say, you know, that it's just as much or possibly more often that I'm watching video without the audio and Yeah. And having the full expectation that, yes, you should be telling me what's happening in this video. I should I should fully understand everything that's happening without it. And I find that interesting because it gets back to deviate a little bit from the main topic here, but, you know, coming from a community media background where we were working on shows like Democracy Now where it's a show primarily, first and foremost, made for television, but they knew that they were gonna turn around and use that as a radio program. Mhmm. And so they were making it intentionally knowing that it was going to be consumed as audio only Yep. Knowing that they were gonna want to kind of audio describe everything in the moment. And just those were sort of the early practices that I saw that I just kind of baked into everything I started doing moving forward even the even without, captions becoming Sure. What they are today. And and those programs were captioned, and translated for that part. But but that was that was an outlier at that point. Not everybody was doing that. They were intentionally being proactive, about that and not waiting for it to be required in the way that it is now. But it's so interesting to see how it's really expanded from being an accessibility concern to just really a entire cultural shift in the way that we consume media. Totally. I I there's a couple parts of things that you said that are really fascinating I wanted to to touch on there. So, a, yeah, like, democracy now definitely was an outlier by making sure that everything was consumable as audio only even though it was being done as a a TV series Mhmm. And then everything always being captioned and translated. And now it's funny because you can see more and more of the the the way things are handled are closer to that. Almost everything is now captioned, but not translated. Very little content is being translated by folks either dubbed or or full on language translation. So I think that's one of the next steps we're gonna see in consumer expectations. People are going to expect that they're going to be able to put on subtitles in a different language than English. And even as we continue to go down the line here and this technology is coming out, ability to do live AI dubbing, being able to hear it in French or in Tagalog or whatever language they've selected. And that's gonna come out for, you know, Olympics coverage and CNN and big call letter stuff, and then it's gonna trickle its way down. And it's not gonna be, like, a five year trickle process. It's gonna be, like, a year and a half or a year long process before everyone's expecting it at the local level just because those expectations shift now. Sorry. Go ahead. Picturing I'm picturing a setting, you know, when you when you open an account, you know, or your TikTok account or something. There's just a setting where you select your native language, and then everything is just automatically presented to you to the best of their AI ability in that language in real time. Yeah. I feel like we're not that far from something like that. So so with all of that in mind, you know, we've we've spent this time kind of giving the lay of the land, talking about what what the youths expect. What what are cities doing? How far behind are cities in meeting these expectations? That that's a great point. So I would say, first thing I'd say is cities are doing a much better job. Right? I feel like more and more cities are adding captions to their meetings and and to their short form content. And if anybody is gonna be watching that video on their phone, they're gonna be able to do it with the sound off while they're sitting at work and their boss is talking and they're watching it under the table on the phone or or whatever scenario you're, you know, sneak watching the local council meeting. Yeah. We're not tattling on anybody. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's usually when I'm watching the meeting is when I'm supposed to be in a different meeting. But I I would say the big thing I've noticed, and maybe I'm I'm inaccurate here, but every platform and you and I have talked about this before. Every platform you add that you're gonna distribute to, we're gonna start putting our content out on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and also Snapchat. And every each platform that you're contributing to and putting stuff up, it's more time, more energy. And I feel like a lot of folks kind of hit the capacity point, and that might be why I don't see folks embracing TikTok to the degree that the market of people watching video, young to old, have. And maybe it's because the nature of of TikTok videos being so short. You know, I've only seen a few things, like, from public libraries where they've jumped on viral video trends and things I've not really seen seen cities really embrace that. And I think if they lean into that, that's gonna be where they're now suddenly, like you said, expected to be engaging with captions, not just as an accessibility issue, but as a way of framing it, of putting additional context of of making it something that works in that very text heavy medium as funny as it is to say. Go ahead. It introduces a layer of marketing, for lack of a better term, because you are now, as we mentioned before, using captions in a way that sort of add to the aesthetic of the video or add to the in the intention of the messaging. You know? So now suddenly it's not just information. Mhmm. You're having to stand out among people who are spending lots and lots of time and lots and lots of money in this attention economy to show up in people's for you feeds. Right? Yeah. And and I could see that being intimidating to public information officers. I could see that being also an interesting challenge depending on who's in charge and and what their goals are. You know, there's so many opportunities with things like PSAs, educating people about elections. There's also the interesting challenge of putting content that these organizations have typically been making for a very hyperlocal audience on a platform that is global and understanding how that might change the content a little bit Yeah. As well. Do you want to continue to only have that hyperlocal focus, or do you think that it it's worth it to create something that might have more reach or more value beyond your local community? Because I think I've seen some of the content you're talking about from the libraries, and I definitely think that they do a great job of creating content that is, you know, made by a local organization but certainly has relevance to a global audience, and I find that so refreshing and fun to watch. And so and cities could be doing that, and they might get pushback from certain people about whether or not those resources are being used appropriately. But Well it's just an interesting thing to to watch it play out. Plus there's the there's the promise slash risk of going viral. Mhmm. It may benefit you. It may look good for your own job and awards if the one of the videos you make gets, hundred times or a thousand times the views you normally get. And it may be, like, really terrible for you if one of the videos gets, like, ten million times more videos than you normally get because being the center of that attention can be problematic. So I think, you know, there's also that concern of, like Yeah. But I don't think that that's a new concern because we've always you know, we've seen people like John Oliver or John Stewart, like, finding their teams dig through these local campaign videos or local news clips and put that stuff out. I think there's always been once you put something out on the Internet Mhmm. That risk of it going viral and being not quite, you know, what Just maybe opening doors you're maybe not ready for in terms of attention. I mean and, again, I haven't I haven't seen any cities videos go viral in a way where it's ever been a problem for them. It's just one more thing I think that maybe is one of the factors why people are like, hey. I don't necessarily wanna open the door on TikTok. The other thing I wanna bring up real quick because we're on this about generational, stuff is that I feel like most people when I talk to them over the years believe that their core market for adding captions are the elderly and the hard of hearing because I think logic says those are the folks who would have the harder time hearing the meeting. And And the reason that those things exist in the first place. Yeah. The reason those things exist, they created it specifically to serve, folks with hearing disabilities and folks with hard of hearing. But what we see, at least every report I'm seeing, and I'd be really fascinated if people wanna, you know, try doing this even the spot poll in their local community, is that if you grab a group of of folks on the on the younger end of you and I who are on the the borderline between the the the Gen x and the millennial, and you grab folks on the the higher end, that there's a more expectation and use of captions by millennials and especially Gen z and then even, I don't know, Gen f. But the younger you go, the higher the expectation for captions. And then the folks, age wise at the top, don't actually numerically use it quite as much as the young folks because I think it's more of a a comprehension and multitasking and how you engage with media difference than anything else. And I think that that's interesting because it probably goes a little bit hand in hand with technology literacy Mhmm. For older folks not necessarily knowing where to turn on those settings if there's something that needs to be turned on in a video player. And also perhaps the fact that if someone is actually hard of hearing, maybe they have hearing aids at an older age, then they don't necessarily look for those things. And it I just find it funny because, like we said, those features were developed for those communities, but there's also all these other tools that serve those communities. So even though we've worked to make those even though we've worked to make things like caption ubiquitous, they have, on their own, become something else for the younger generations and have just become something that everybody expects. I wanna talk a little bit about we've talked about social media platforms. Mhmm. And I wanna talk a little bit about streaming platforms Sure. As well because we know that there's obviously a lot of changes happening in cable viewership. You know? And, originally, a lot of these cities were primarily distributing on city cable channels. So now that we're seeing fewer and fewer people watching on cable, what are we seeing across the country in terms of willingness or apprehension on adopting, you know, streaming apps and things like that? That's that's a great question. So, you know, as we were talking earlier about shifting expectations and how you kinda witness it being a lot different five years ago or ten years ago. I was actually trying to sell the very first generation of streaming to Roku and things like that three, four jobs ago, twelve, fifteen years ago, I think, at this point, going out there. And the amount of, you know, pushback at that point of, like, oh, we have our channel, and we get our funding from our channel, and we don't want people watching it on other platforms. And ten years ago, the amount you saw and even five years ago. And and now what I'm seeing is we recently had a client. We presented them. Alright. You can stream to one of these five platforms within the budget that was already set up and discussed. And then these are the other four platforms. You know? Going through the five platforms that we could stream to with cable cast is over the top channels. Apple TV, Fire TV, iOS, Android, and Roku, I think. And I was expecting, you know, they have a max budget they've been looking at here. But instead, they they wanted to do all five channels or all five platforms and immediately wanted to make sure they hit all of them. And I I think that that's very different than what we were seeing five years ago where people are maybe willing to tip their toe in and try, and they would ask, well, what's the one platform that gets the most viewers or we're gonna spend some time surveying to see if people are using Roku or Apple here. And and now what I'm seeing is people see that the whole market has been split across people on their phone and people on their built in Roku and people on their stick that plugs into their TV. And I'm seeing people lean towards that For sure. And make sure that they're still supporting their channel and and and getting all the accessibility towards the channel that they need. But being worried more about those over the top channels because they can have a pristine HD signal, and it can look really, really good. And they're not dealing with the cable company's issues. I'm making their TV signal look bad. So I just feel like it's been a shift on what people are excited about. I think it's a mix of that. And then I'd I'd be interested to know your opinion on this too. I think folks that work in this cable industry Mhmm. Have gotten used to still, like, looking at their cable channel on a regular basis, right, and thinking about it. But I think that in the last five years, you've also seen even the people that were really holding on to their cable subscriptions or just to, you know, their love of of the linear style of of programming and being able to turn something on and not have to make a decision. You're starting to see everybody really adopting these platforms for themselves. You know? So as somebody who works in the industry programming a cable channel, now they're actually going home and watching something on their Apple TV or their Roku or their Fire Stick instead of on a cable box, and they're finally seeing, like, oh, this is great because not only can I watch this on this box at home, but I could also have this app on my phone, and I can, you know, watch the full city council meeting on my phone on my commute to work if I'm on the bus or on the train or something like that? I feel like that's been kind of a a big part of it as well. Sure. There were all these people that were really hanging on to consuming things in a in a particular way, whether it was for sports or live news coverage or whatever it was, and then they finally decided, like, no. This this streaming app thing is so much cheaper, so much more convenient. I can watch it on all my devices so easily. I I think you nailed it. And, again, I'm I'm what I call sports stuff, the way some people are tone deaf or color blind. I'm sports blind. I know all the different sports, but two seconds in, I'm in a terrible space of the conversation. But I do know that there was a huge shift in yeah. Those streaming services are fine, but you can't watch the big game on it too. Mhmm. A year or two ago suddenly, like, oh, no. The only way you're gonna watch this game is if you download this new service that they just created and that you have to watch the game on and you need to. And if if you were hanging on because of professional football, that's now on the streaming service instead. So and, actually, just to say out there, this has been and, again, I'm just observing it from outside as, someone who's not really tied into sports production or the the big money advertising broadcast component. But what I've picked up a bit is that that split of all the football games or all the hockey games were all through a singular contract to, hey. We're gonna put this game on this service and this game on this service and this one over here. It's been really bad financially in the production market because a lot of folks had bet their production contracts are on advertising, not getting quite enough advertising. And it's part of the reason there's a big slowdown financially in the broadcast industry around spending production wise because so much was spent on sports production that is now not being spent because no one was making quite the money off of the contracts for their productions that they were hoping because they're competing against the game being split onto different services. So it it it's not just a changing expectation, but the entirety of how money's gotten moved around in the in the world of broadcast technology and production has kinda hit a big wall. And it's why NAB had less vendors than in the past year before because a lot of that big production money wasn't getting spent because all those sports productions are being divvied up on the different networks. Anyway But it but it is becoming, you know, very clear to what is it? Even the the most hardcore broadcast star stalwarts, we'll call them. That's the word stalwart. Yeah. Exactly. Holding out for cable to keep keep winning the game. Yeah. Not necessarily winning, I guess, but just not thinking that people will actually look for the content on the streaming platforms, I think. And I and we have the tools now to show that people are. You know? We can see who's watching. We can see when they're tuning in, like, whether they're watching things live or on demand. And that, I think, gives people the added confidence that the investment is worth it and that it's worth the extra time to promote that you're on these other platforms as well. And I I think we're gonna start to see cities adopt it more quickly Oh, for sure. Across the country. And, you know, there's a lot of workflows out there that don't require hardly any additional capacity really to put that programming out there beyond what you're already doing to program your cable channel, including adding things like like captions to the videos. So I think that's gonna be even easier for a lot of communications departments to adopt than trying to mount something on TikTok. Exactly. That's gonna be a little bit more manual for them. If you're if you're embracing a whole new video medium that involves a different type of video like TikTok, yeah, you're gonna have to be creating content for that. If you're if you're doing you just mentioned extending the video you produce for your cable channel and for your live stream of the meetings and extending that into a channel on all these different platforms. Like you said, that's actually really easy because it's all integrated. The main thing ends up being designing, it, making it with your colors and your graphics look the way you want. Because then after that, everything just follows through from what you produce for the channel just shows up on these other platforms. So, yeah, you're right. It's that doesn't really take too much of our capacity. And I think that's also why we're seeing people lean into that more than, hey. We're gonna take two additional people and make it their full time job to be the TikTok crew or whatever it takes to to learn and and pull that off. For sure. So we've been talking about meeting shifting consumer expectations in local government video, local government communication, where where to reach viewers, what options they expect with the content that you're presenting to them on these platforms, and what it takes to expand to the newer platforms. And we've been talking to Daniel Krawczyk of Municipal Captioning. And, Daniel, I know you'll be back again. We always love to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for talking to us about this today. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.