Amara, formerly known as Universal Subtitles, is a web-based non-profit project created by the
Participatory Culture Foundation
The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is a non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its primary project is a free and open-source software Internet television platform called Miro, formerly called the Democracy player. It ...
that hosts and allows user-subtitled video to be accessed and created. Users upload video through many major video hosting websites such as
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
,
Vimeo
Vimeo ( ) is an American Online video platform, video hosting, sharing, and services provider founded in 2004 and headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices and operates on a ...
, and
Ustream
IBM Watson Media (formerly Ustream and IBM Cloud Video) is an American virtual events platform company which is a division of IBM. Prior to the IBM acquisition, it had more than 180 employees across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Budapest office ...
to subtitle.
It uses
crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
techniques to subtitle video as well as having a paid service for professionally created subtitles. Users of the project and service include
Mozilla
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...
,
PBS
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...
,
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by Sal Khan. Its goal is to create a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short video lessons. Its website also includes suppl ...
,
Netflix
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...
,
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
,
Coursera
Coursera Inc. () is an American global massive open online course provider. It was founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offe ...
,
Udacity
Udacity, Inc. is an American global for-profit massive open online course provider. It was founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses.
According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity com ...
, and
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
.
Most companies listed have "teams" organized by Amara on the website that focus on translation and caption of videos. Amara claims that it lowers the cost of captioning and translation by at least 95 percent because of their volunteer-based system.
The software for the Amara platform was previously
open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
under the
GNU Affero General Public License
The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the ''Affero General Public License'' (non-GNU).
It is intended fo ...
. In January 2020, Amara announced that the platform would become