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 websites, 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 showtimes 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 showtimes. We've provided captioned showtimes for over 15,000 unique locations across the United States. Our 260 captioned trailers have been viewed 102,249 times. (Avatar was #1, followed by Alice in Wonderland, Twlight Saga: New Moon, See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary, and The Blind Side). Overall, we have served up over half a million page views.
Over the past year, the aforementioned numbers have driven the evolution of our vision. 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 showtimes, 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 showtimes. 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!
Lastly, Captionfish wouldn't be where it is today without the support of the many great people that have believed in its vision. Bill Creswell of Captionwire for all of the hard work that has gone into captioning the trailers. Nanci Linke-Ellis of Captions West. Steve Ellis of Ellis Consultancy. Mary Watkins at WGBH. Hilari Scarl and her team at Worldplay, Inc for partnering with us and graciously featuring our logo on the step and repeat on the red carpet at the See What I'm Saying World Premiere in Los Angeles and New York City. Wayne Betts, Jr., Ed Bosson, Robin Horwitz, and Chad Taylor of Convo Communications who believed enough to provide us with the sponsorship needed to keep the site up and running. My wife Molly and all of her patience while I've spent hours working on the site, especially for allowing me to crawl into bed at 2AM every night. My DeafCode partners, Brendan Gramer, for all the great work with designing and marketing the site, and burning the midnight oil with me more times than I want to count, and Greg Millam, for building and maintaining our development and production servers. And most importantly, fans like you, new and old, who keep coming back. Thank you all for your support. It's appreciated in more ways than I could ever describe.
It's been a fun year. Here's to another one!
Chris Sano
May 18, 2010