Your sermon archive has no captions. All of it can.
Churches posted sermons to Vimeo for years before 2022. None of those videos have captions — Vimeo only started auto-captioning uploads in May 2022 — and the only fix is to upload them again. Recaption does that for the whole archive in one run.
How church libraries got stuck
A typical church Vimeo account is a decade of Sundays: hundreds of sermons, plus weddings, classes, and holiday services, uploaded steadily since the early 2010s. Every upload before May 25, 2022 predates Vimeo's automatic captions, so the entire back catalogue plays silent.
Vimeo can't caption a video in place — its own help docs say re-uploading is the fix. Nobody on staff has time to download and re-upload 400 sermons by hand, so the archive stays uncaptioned year after year.
Why captions matter here.
- Deaf and hard-of-hearing members. Captions are the difference between including these members in the sermon archive and leaving them the livestream only. Older congregations feel this most.
- Sermons people actually re-watch. Members catch up on phones — on lunch breaks, on the bus, with the sound off. Captions keep the message watchable everywhere.
- A quotable archive. Each captioned sermon has a transcript you can read in Vimeo's editor. Pulling quotes for bulletins and study guides stops being a scrub-and-pause job.
- A flat price a church budget survives. One fee per run, no subscription. Per-minute transcription of a decade of sermons costs orders of magnitude more.
What a run looks like for a church
Paste a Vimeo token, review how many videos are missing captions, and start the run. Recaption re-uploads each un-captioned sermon so Vimeo captions the fresh copy — tagged [cc], private by default, originals untouched. When it finishes you get an email with the full list, and the captioned copies are ready to swap into your website and app embeds.
Questions.
- Is a church legally required to caption sermons?
- Generally no — religious organizations are largely exempt from the ADA's public-accommodation rules. Most churches caption because members need it, not because a regulation does.
- Our services start with music. Will auto captions fail?
- They can: Vimeo's transcription fails when silence fills the first 30 seconds or music drowns out the speaker. Sermons where the message starts promptly caption well; videos with long worship intros may need the intro trimmed first.
- We have a free Vimeo account. Will this work?
- Auto captions are a paid-plan feature, so the account needs a paid plan before re-uploaded videos get captioned. Any paid tier that includes Auto-CC works.