Captionator.tv is not tveeder, but it does what tveeder did. tveeder went offline, and this site was built so that its readers would still have somewhere to read Australian TV as it airs. If you came here looking for tveeder, read on: what you knew is here, and more besides.
What tveeder was
tveeder.com streamed the closed captions of Australian free-to-air TV to the web as they aired, from about 2011. Pick a channel and the words appeared a few seconds behind the broadcast, with a screen grab from the programme now and then, and each programme had a page of its own archived captions. It was run by volunteers and funded by its readers. Journalists leant on it to quote press conferences and news bulletins accurately, people who are deaf or hard of hearing used it to follow TV and to check the quality of the captions, and anyone could catch up on what had just been said. Its server has since gone offline.
What Captionator.tv is
Captionator.tv is a rebuild of tveeder by Ben Grubb, made in tribute to it and in his own time. It isn't connected to the people who ran tveeder, and it isn't run, funded or endorsed by any broadcaster. It does what tveeder did, live captions from ABC TV, ABC News, Seven, 9, 10, SBS and NITV, and goes further:
- More channels and cities. The free-to-air channels in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, Sky News, world news channels such as BBC News, DW and Al Jazeera, business channels such as Bloomberg and ausbiz, and Federal Parliament.
- Radio. ABC Radio Sydney and Melbourne, ABC RN, ABC NewsRadio, 2GB and 3AW, transcribed live by speech recognition.
- Search. Every line is archived, so you can search everything said on every channel, by exact words or by meaning, and narrow it by channel, date or programme.
- Hear it. On radio and most TV channels, click any word to play the audio from there, or select a passage to hear just that.
- Quote and link. Select some words to quote them with a citation, or copy a link to the exact moment they aired.
- Alerts. Add a name or phrase and get an email the moment it's said on air.
- Watch. News channels playing side by side, straight from the broadcasters, with recording.
tveeder's old links still work
tveeder's addresses used each channel's broadcast service number, and Captionator.tv answers the same ones: /1072/live still opens Nine's live captions, /560/live ABC TV, /561/live ABC News, /1328/live Seven, /1589/live 10 and /785/live SBS, along with the programme pages and the links to a programme's archived captions. Old bookmarks and links in articles keep working.
Credits
The name tveeder and the original site belong to the people who made it; it's named here only to say what this site carries on from. The captions themselves belong to the broadcasters and their captioners (see the credits). If you were part of tveeder and would like something here put differently, get in touch.