With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.

The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers. Transcriptions are performed by a human (capable of typing quite quickly, naturally) who listens in to the feed and transcribes in real time, anywhere in the world. To help achieve a true real-time experience, PlyMedia is actually teaming with some live streamers to integrate a slight delay (say, two or three seconds) to give the transcriptionist enough lead time to generate captions in time with the video. Those transcriptions can then be sent to the site hosting the video, where they can be posted to help with SEO (and to give readers a chance to skim through the content to decide if they want to watch the movie).

PlyMedia transcribing the Realtime CrunchUp in realtime in our Ustream video. The realtime transcription service will be used by UStream, Livestream, and the Wall Street Journal.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below). Get your tickets here.

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

If there is anything that is capturing the attention and excitement of the technology community right now, it is realtime streams. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and startups galore are all active in the realtime Web and will be at the event. Nearly 40 startups applied to fill ten demo slots for new realtime product launches.

But as more of us immerse ourselves in our Twitter and Facebook streams, and Foursquare check-ins, the need to filter out the noise is becoming acute. That will be a big theme, and we’ll hear about different approaches to do that ranging from better user interfaces to better realtime search. We are also seeing the emergence of new types of streams, particularly geo streams that tell everyone where you are at any given moment, and media streams that inject photos, videos, and other content beyond text into the the realtime conversation.

The CrunchUp will explore both the technological side of the phenomenon and the business side. These streams represent a new communications layer across the Web, as well as a platform for building products and startups. Come join us to find out where the stream is going next.

If you feel like your company can add to the few holes left in the agenda, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com. Bloggers and journalists can request a press pass by contacting Daniel Brusilovsky.

The CrunchUp also provides an amazing sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
Angel Investor Ron Conway
MySpace, Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

Hot Potato (event streams, launch)
Seesmic (a special surprise)
StatusNet (DIY microblogging, launch)
Stealth Startup (RT social address book)
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

PlyMedia (new product launch)
Stealth Startup (live video streams)
Stealth Startup (RT news streams)
Tweetmeme (new product launch)
Rippol (video streams, public launch)
Stealth Startup (mobile noise assassin)
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more
NewTek, SVP strategic development Philip Nelson

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
Foursquare, VP business development Tristan Walker
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Facebook/Friendfeed, Paul Buchheit

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party

Tickets are on sale now. You can still get them for $395. Prices go up to $495 the week before the event.

SubPLY will provide English & Spanish captioning to 5000 YouTube videos submitted by TechCrunch readers. The video source language must be English and video duration cannot exceed 5 minutes. The captioning will be available within 24-hours of video submission. Offer details and how-to, here.

Is captioning videos really worth the hassle? YouTube clearly believes as much and PLYmedia’s internal research supports this claim as well. SubPLY was piloted with a video publisher that tested ten different videos for a period of six weeks, in three different languages (English, Spanish and French). Here are the results for videos watched with captioning:

1. Foreign language usage and viewership increased over 700% in a 5 week period.
2. 19% more viewers watched videos to completion than those without subtitles.
3. The share function (sending the video to others) was used by viewers watching subtitles 171% more often (the viral effect was boosted).
4. A 37% increase in both users who watched the video in full screen mode and users who replayed video.

A short backgrounder on PLYmedia: The Israeli company, which recently raised $6 million, provides video publishers the ability to add layers—”PLYs” as the company calls them—on top of their video players. These layers allow a variety of interactive applications to be offered along with the video with fairly minimal hassle for the publishers. The applications can range from BubblePLY (that lets users add text, images and graphics to videos) to information enrichment via infoPLY to ad overlays via adPLY.

SubPLY, the newest addition to PLYmedia’s range of “PLYd” applications is a dead-simple service that adds captioning to videos. All one has to do is provide a URL of a previously uploaded video and in return receive a new embed code from SubPLY that loads the original player along with the additional code necessary to overlay the captions. See the bottom of the post for an example.

SubPLY is being launched with captioning translation for 42 languages. The company will provide commercial customers a turnaround as quick as two hours from submitting the video to having the captioning active on it. Important to note is that the SubPLY embed code can be embedded immediately and the captioning functionality will appear once it’s available. Adding additional languages down the road will not require a code change, they will simply appear as soon as they are ready to go. Another aspect worthy of note is that the subtitles are encapsulated in an XML file that is made available with the SubPLY code. This means that videos are not only enriched with captioning, they are also enriched with additional SEO juice (XML files are parsed by search engines).

Pricing depends on the type of content, turnaround time, and scope of work per customer. There is also pricing “seasonality”. Current pricing is available here.

SubPly will open-up its translation tools in the coming months, allowing any user to create closed captions and subtitles. The tools were specifically created for online video, optimized for Flash and require no upload or transcoding.

http://services.plymedia.com/players/YouTube/embed/vf21fa3b1ab414803851214bbe0205b77

Web video startup PLYmedia recently raised a round of $6 million to $6.5 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. The funding has not yet been announced, but the investors are believed to be Greylock and Elron Electronic Industries, an Israeli holding company. (In fact, Elron already disclosed its investment in PLYmedia in the first quarter). Individual investors (who may have put their money in at an earlier angel round) include former PayPal CEO Bill Harris, former LucasFilm president Gordon Radley, and Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics (which became Google’s AdSense).

PLYmedia adds interactive layers onto Web video. These include word bubbles, subtitles, information windows, links, and ads. The company was voted the most promising Israeli startup in a Microsoft-sponsored contest last April.

The video below shows an example of its BubblePLY technology, which makes it easy to annotate videos with word balloons.

The general public is invited to parts of the show. more information is available on this website, including speakers.

Participating startups include 5min, Plymedia, AllofMe, Nuconomy, ClickTale, blogTV, Sportingo, PicScout, Qoof, 8hands, Velingo, Innovid, Semingo, PageOnce and Journeys.

I moderated a panel at the event last year. Highlights from that panel and the event in general are in the video below.