Always on Top Entertainment LLC
Audio description that stands up to an audit.
Description, captions and picture restoration for archive and independent film — produced in house, priced on the page, and delivered with the written conformance report your compliance officer is going to be asked for.
Rates below. No sales call required to see them.
The ADA Title II rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and Level AA includes SC 1.2.5, Audio Description (Prerecorded). Level A lets you substitute a text alternative. AA does not. Every prerecorded video a public entity publishes needs a description track.
28 CFR 35.200. Public entities of 50,000 or more by 26 April 2027; smaller entities and special districts by 26 April 2028.
Measured, not estimated
The numbers are from our own pipeline
Every figure here comes from a run against a real film, not a marketing page.
Human review runs 1.5–2× runtime and is the part that cannot be automated. We do not pretend otherwise, and it is why the turnarounds below are what they are.
One pass, four deliverables
What arrives
A described master
Two audio tracks in one file — the original and the described mix — so the description is separable, which is what EN 301 549 cl. 7.2 asks for. It is also why a separate track is worth having at all: under 47 CFR 79.105 the players and devices your audience already owns are required to decode and pass through a secondary audio stream.
A separable description stem
The narration on its own, as PCM, so you can remix it against a different picture later without coming back to us.
Captions
WebVTT and SRT at broadcast standard: 42 characters, two lines, 17 characters per second, minimum durations respected.
A written conformance report
Placement, coverage, pace, loudness, track structure and flags — per title, with the sign-off lines left blank for your own reviewer.
Published rates
What it costs
Per minute of finished runtime, in US dollars. You can raise a purchase order against these without talking to anybody.
Standard
$7.50 / min
$675.00 for a 90-minute feature
- Synthetic voice, captions included, two business days.
- Description track, captions and a conformance report
- Written here, never outsourced
- Two rounds of revisions included
Priority
$10.00 / min
$900.00 for a 90-minute feature
- Next business day.
- Description track, captions and a conformance report
- Written here, never outsourced
- Two rounds of revisions included
Studio voice
$18.00 / min
$1,620.00 for a 90-minute feature
- A person reads it, not a synthesiser. Five business days.
- Description track, captions and a conformance report
- Read by a person in our own room
- Two rounds of revisions included
Captions and SDH only
$2.50 / min
$225.00 for a 90-minute feature
- WebVTT and SRT. No description.
- WebVTT and SRT, broadcast-standard line breaks
- Written here, never outsourced
- Two rounds of revisions included
Volume
25 titles or more, 25% off.
10 titles or more, 15% off.
For a whole catalog we will quote a flat price per title. Institutions find a single line item far easier to approve than a per-minute estimate that moves, and nobody else in this field offers one.
Picture restoration
Quoted per title, never a flat rate. What it costs depends entirely on the state of the print, and no honest number survives contact with a bad element.
Included, not billed
Two rounds of revisions
The description arrives as a timed cue list beside the master, so you can review it cue by cue against the picture and send notes against the timecode. We return a corrected master within three business days of each round.
| Included | Two rounds, within 30 days of delivery. Three business days per round. |
|---|---|
| In scope | Wording, timing, emphasis, pronunciation, and how on-screen text is read. |
| Not in scope | Re-cutting the film, or changing the source master. If the picture changes, the description was written against a different film and that is new work. |
| How to send notes | All of a round’s notes in one message, against the timecode. It is what keeps a round quick, and it is why revisions are included rather than billed. |
| After two rounds | A flat fee, quoted before we start, so it is never a surprise on an invoice. |
How it works
Four steps, no sales call
1 Send us the material
A link is fine — Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer, S3, Aspera. A feature master is tens of gigabytes and nobody in this business moves one through a browser.
2 We confirm before we start
A person looks at the material and confirms it is workable. The turnaround clock starts there, not at checkout, so a bad file never becomes a missed deadline.
3 You review it
Description, captions and the conformance report, with the cue list to check against the picture. Two rounds of notes are included.
4 You own it
Masters, stems and caption files are yours. No per-play license, no platform lock, nothing to renew.
Built against
The standards, named
| Standard | What we do about it |
|---|---|
| WCAG 2.1 AA — SC 1.2.5 | A description track on every title, which is what Level AA requires and Level A does not. |
| WCAG 2.1 A — SC 1.2.2 | Captions delivered with every described title, as WebVTT and SRT. |
| 47 CFR 79.105 | An apparatus rule, binding the players and devices rather than us: they must decode and pass through a secondary audio stream. We ship the separable track that makes that work downstream. The rule for the programming itself is 79.3, and it binds video programming distributors. |
| EN 301 549 cl. 7.2 | Separable description, which is why you also get the stem on its own. |
| ADA Title II — 28 CFR 35.200 | The deadline this is all for: 26 April 2027, or 2028 for smaller entities. |
Check the work first
Everything we claim is playing on this site
These play with description on. Each links to the same film without it, so you can hear the difference rather than take our word for it — and the caption files and the rights research are published beside them.
Century 21 Calling
Play it described
Sound only — 26 MB rather than 410 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Century 21 Calling without description, for comparison.
Design for Dreaming
Play it described
Sound only — 17 MB rather than 746 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Design for Dreaming without description, for comparison.
Habit Patterns
Play it described
Sound only — 26 MB rather than 102 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Habit Patterns without description, for comparison.
Inner Sanctum
Play it described
Sound only — 120 MB rather than 795 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Inner Sanctum without description, for comparison.
Mr. B Natural
Play it described
Sound only — 49 MB rather than 290 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Mr. B Natural without description, for comparison.
Night of the Living Dead
Play it described
Sound only — 183 MB rather than 2.3 GB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. Night of the Living Dead without description, for comparison.
One Week
Play it described
Sound only — 43 MB rather than 474 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. One Week without description, for comparison.
The Amazing Mr. X
Play it described
Sound only — 144 MB rather than 606 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. The Amazing Mr. X without description, for comparison.
The Brain That Wouldn't Die
Play it described
Audio described. The Brain That Wouldn't Die without description, for comparison.
About The Brain That Wouldn't Die · Why it is ours to publish
The Great Train Robbery
Play it described
Sound only — 20 MB rather than 347 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. The Great Train Robbery without description, for comparison.
The Home Economics Story
Play it described
Sound only — 48 MB rather than 280 MB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. The Home Economics Story without description, for comparison.
The Killer Shrews
Play it described
Audio described. The Killer Shrews without description, for comparison.
The Little Shop of Horrors
Play it described
Sound only — 131 MB rather than 2.6 GB. The description stem, which is one of the four deliverables.
Audio described. The Little Shop of Horrors without description, for comparison.
About The Little Shop of Horrors · Why it is ours to publish
The legal part, plainly
Does the law actually require this?
Does WCAG 2.1 Level AA require audio description?
Yes. Success Criterion 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded) is Level AA. At Level A you may substitute a text alternative for the video. At Level AA you may not, so a real description track is required rather than a transcript.
When is the deadline for government video?
The DOJ rule at 28 CFR 35.200 adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA for state and local government under ADA Title II. Public entities serving 50,000 or more: 26 April 2027. Smaller entities and special districts: 26 April 2028. Title II binds government, not private business — if you are a private company, your obligation comes from Title III case law, your own contracts, or a customer requirement, and it is worth knowing which.
Does every video need it?
No, and we would rather say so before you pay. 1.2.5 applies where the picture carries information the soundtrack does not already convey. If your narrator already says what is on screen, the video may conform as it stands. Send us the file and we will tell you if you need nothing.
What about Section 508?
Federal is not a future deadline. It is already past. The 2017 refresh of Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d) adopted WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA for electronic content, with a compliance date of 18 January 2018. WCAG 2.0 Level AA already contains SC 1.2.5, so federal agencies, and the contractors delivering video to them, have been required to provide audio description for prerecorded video since then.
The practical difference is only the version. Section 508 points at WCAG 2.0 AA; ADA Title II points at 2.1 AA. For audio description and captioning the requirement is materially the same, and work produced to the 2.1 standard satisfies both. If you are delivering under a federal contract, ask us for the conformance report against 508 specifically and that is what you will get.
This is a plain reading of published rules, not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. Anything that turns on your specific obligation should go past your own counsel.
Who is actually doing this
There is a real room behind the studio tier, and it has a name
The studio-voice reads are recorded at The Hitbox, our own commercial recording studio, open in its commercial location for over eight years. Albums recorded and produced in it, and thousands of songs mixed in it, long before any of them were films.
The audio on every tier is directed by an engineer who has been recording and mixing since 2001, working professionally in studios since 2003, with twenty years of mastering behind that. That is the difference between using a tool and being sold by one: on the synthetic tiers the machine does the reading, and a person who has spent a career on level, placement and intelligibility decides whether what came back is acceptable. Most of the corrections we make are not ones a novice would know to make.
Picture restoration is digital. We do color, grain, damage and stabilization work on scans, and audio restoration on the tracks that come with them. Nobody here touches film, and this page will never imply a photochemical lab we do not have.
Check it with a network tab
No third-party anything
There is no analytics script on this site, no tag manager, no advertising pixel and no embedded font service. No cookie is set by visiting this page. Loading it contacts no server but ours.
That is not a privacy posture we adopted for a page — it is why the
Content-Security-Policy can say script-src 'self' with no exceptions,
and it is one fewer thing for your own procurement review to write up.
Read this part
What we will not claim
The conformance report verifies placement, coverage, pace, loudness, track structure and flags. It then states plainly that it does not establish whether the description is accurate — whether it says what is on screen, names the right person and omits nothing a sighted viewer relies on. Measurement can refute a cue and cannot confirm one; establishing accuracy still takes a person watching the film against the script.
The sign-off lines are left blank rather than pre-filled. A report that rubber-stamps is worth nothing to an auditor.
Two passes look at the picture, and they are not the same pass. The whole runtime is sampled at two frames a second and read by a person before a word of description is written, with a coverage check that refuses a gap longer than two minutes. Then an object detector runs over the film and every cue is cross-checked against what it saw — which catches the error a tired reader makes, a cue saying “he” over a shot of two women.
We state the limit of that plainly, because it is the question worth asking of anyone selling this. A detection is strong evidence; a non-detection is not. The model is trained on modern color photographs and under-detects on an old black-and-white print — and it knows nothing about a hearse or a gantry. So a cue that contradicts what was detected is a defect we fix; a cue the detector cannot confirm is a question we ask, never a failure we report. A tool that treated absence as fact would be confidently wrong.
Your print never leaves our machines. The detector runs locally on a six-megabyte model, not against a hosted vision API, so nothing is uploaded to a third party to be indexed — which for an archive holding an unreleased element is usually the first thing asked and the last thing answered.
We do not describe in languages other than English. That is a real gap and somebody else’s strength, and we would rather say so here than have you find out afterwards.
Our catalog also links out to Tubi, Pluto and YouTube, and those play in their players — we make no conformance claim about software we do not control.
Who you are contracting with
| Company | Always on Top Entertainment LLC, registered in Florida. |
|---|---|
| Who does the work | The two principals. No account-management layer, no offshore subcontracting. |
| Contact | Michael Bamonte — mike@tapeterritory.com |
| Third parties | None. This page loads no external script, font or tracker, and sets no cookie. |