Your best-selling course has no captions.
If your course library went up on Vimeo before mid-2022, none of it has captions — Vimeo can't add them to existing videos. Buyers notice now. Recaption re-uploads the library so every lesson gets captioned, without touching the originals mid-run.
Why course libraries hit the wall
Courses recorded between 2015 and 2021 were uploaded to Vimeo and embedded into Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or your own site. Those lessons still sell — but they predate Vimeo's auto captions, which only run on uploads after May 25, 2022.
The fix Vimeo documents is re-uploading each video. For a 200-lesson catalogue that's days of careful manual work, which is why it never gets done.
Why captions matter here.
- Buyers expect captions now. Captions have become table stakes in paid courses. Their absence shows up in refund requests and reviews.
- Non-native speakers. A large share of course buyers learn in a second language. Captions are how they follow technical material at full speed.
- Mute-first viewing. Lessons get watched on lunch breaks and late nights with the sound off. No captions means those sessions don't happen.
- One flat fee, not per-minute. Transcribing a whole course catalogue per minute is a four-figure line item. A run is one flat fee, however many lessons it covers.
What a run looks like for a course
Recaption scans the account, shows you exactly which lessons are missing captions, then re-uploads each one so Vimeo captions the copy. Copies are private and tagged [cc]; originals and live embeds keep working until you swap them. You get the full original-to-copy list by email when it's done.
Questions.
- Do I have to swap every embed?
- Only when you're ready. The run leaves originals live; moving embeds to the captioned copies is a separate step you can do course by course.
- Will Vimeo's auto captions handle technical terms?
- Mostly, on clean audio — but niche vocabulary needs a pass in Vimeo's transcript editor. Budget an editing pass for your flagship lessons.
- My videos sit behind a course platform, not on vimeo.com.
- Doesn't matter — captions live on the video itself, so they work wherever the Vimeo player is embedded.