The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) congratulates W3C for receiving a Technology & Engineering Emmy ® Award for Timed Text Mark-up Language (TTML). TTML is the backbone of the EBU-TT subtitling format and is of key importance for making content accessible to millions of users across the world. The development of TTML has benefited from extensive work performed in the EBU Subtitling Group (MIM-XMLSubs) and by individual EBU Members. The roots of TTML lie in early work on subtitling led by the late David Kirby while working at BBC R&D.
EBU-TT
Since the publication of TTML 1.0 in 2010, the W3C Timed Text Working Group (TTWG), currently co-chaired by Nigel Megitt (BBC) and David Singer (Apple), has continued to advance the capabilities for authoring and distribution of video captioning. The EBU has specified subtitling formats based on TTML for production, exchange, and archiving (EBU-TT Part 1), for distribution over IP (EBU-TT-D), and for live subtitling (EBU-TT Part 3). It has also specified a mapping from EBU STL files to EBU-TT (EBU-TT Part 2).
IMSC
Current work in W3C focuses on the TTML Profile for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0 (IMSC1). This Candidate Recommendation is intended to simplify TTML implementation and authoring by bringing together popular TTML profiles in use in the industry, including EBU-TT-D. IMSC1 is a superset of EBU-TT-D. It is also expected to become used with the Interoperable Master Format (IMF).