10060149Making Live Comedy AccessibleClosedGrant for R&DInnovate UKLive comedy is notoriously inaccessible. Venues are often in basements and small rooms above pubs with very limited disabled access. Comedy venues are traditionally thought of as 'male' environments with alcohol and stag-dos being part of the culture. NextUp have made great strides in terms of making comedy accessible; we are the digital home of live comedy in the UK - a subscription video platform and distributor of live comedy. We have an unrivalled library of over 400 pre-recorded standup comedy specials available to subscribers via the web and various apps. As well as showcasing recorded content, we have recently branched into live-streaming comedy direct from venues (such as London's Comedy Store), to people's homes. In August we successfully completed a hugely ambitious project to live-stream the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - the biggest arts festival in the world. NextUp's work means that regardless of disability, caring responsibilities, proximity to the venue and cost of tickets, people are able to enjoy and feel part of the rich live comedy scene in the UK. Despite being a relatively small start up with limited funding, accessibility is one of our key drivers as a business. We have added closed captions to all of our recorded content, however our live-streams are currently not captioned. For this project we plan to develop tech which captions the live streams as they happen - enabling those who are D/deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy the live streams as they come through and not just the pre-recorded content we have on offer. Live streams currently get the highest engagement on the platform because they are time sensitive which drives viewers to watch or 'miss out' and also because they often feature big-name comedians. Our live streaming technology enabling comedy to be streamed live from venues to TVs in people's homes is already hugely innovative, and has made great strides in terms of comedy accessibility; this innovation to caption those streams is the next phase of that development.