by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
Going to the movies isn’t much fun when you can’t hear or understand the dialogue. This is the case with multitudes of hard of hearing people. Thus, you want a simple way of finding captioned movies playing near you. This is where Captionfish comes in.
One year ago, I wrote about the debut of Captionfish, the web site that finds captioned movies near you if you live in the USA.
Captionfish has lived up to its expectations and now one year later is going strong and is adding new features.
Following is a letter Captionfish founder Chris Sano wrote on the first anniversary of Captionfish (1).
One Year of Fishing for Captioned Movies
“When we launched Captionfish a year ago, the vision was simple. We wanted to provide a service that would allow people to conveniently find captioned movies playing in theaters near them. It would no longer be a laborious effort. You would not need to visit a handful of theater/ticketing web sites, dig through page after page of data, mentally build up a schedule of what is available and where, and finally decide whether there was anything appealing to go to. Instead, you could go to Captionfish and have all this information available at your fingertips, immediately upon arriving at the site. The faster you could get what you were looking for, the better.
To date, Captionfish has picked up over 465,000 captioned show times for 150 titles playing at 498 theaters. We kicked off 2010 by introducing foreign movies available with full English subtitles. Since then, we’ve added 97 new theaters and picked up an additional 33,263 accessible show times. We’ve provided captioned show times for over 15,000 unique locations across the United States.
Over the past year, we’ve expanded the site based on the feedback we got from many of you. One such example of this is the inclusion of descriptive audio show times, of which we’ve found 105,408 since November 2009. We’ve increased the visibility of our data to provide you with a high level overview of the current state of captioned movies in theaters. We’ve become staunch advocates for equal access in theaters and we continue to work with people in the industry to help understand how we can become stronger players in the movement to improve captioning accessibility for everyone.
Moving forward, we will be expanding into all forms of live entertainment, starting with our new Live Plays feature. We are currently working with several different production houses to include their accessible show times. We hope that this will eventually become large enough for us to integrate with our movie offering so that you will be able to do a search for and find all captioned entertainment in the area of your choosing.
In addition to that, we’re wrapping up work on our new platform that we’re currently calling MovieShare. We envision this being used to build a comprehensive ecosystem of applications and widgets that will help us spread awareness about the availability of accessible movies in theaters across the United States and other regions as we expand into them. The first application to leverage this platform will be our iPhone application. We currently have a working prototype and are very excited about what we’ve come up with. While we’re not quite ready to go into too much detail about the application yet, we’ll definitely let you know when we are, and we’ll be doing a beta program, so be on the lookout for that!
Chris Sano May 18, 2010”
If you are a movie goer, give Captionfish a try. You may be surprised at all the captioned movies playing in theatres in your area.
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(1) http://www.captionfish.com/letter
[Note: Captionfish is shutting down on December 31, 2014. Here is the massage, “We are closing Captionfish down on December 31st. As one of our valued supporters, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your support of Captionfish through its amazing ride. This has been a labor of love, but due to our personal commitments and lack of funding, we are unable to provide ongoing support for Captionfish.”]
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