Inside Televerse — How 4ALL Helped The Television Academy Make Their Inaugural Festival More Inclusive
This past year, 4ALL.Live had the privilege of stepping into something brand new: the Television Academy’s first-ever Televerse Festival. As the event’s real-time captions and translation partner, we helped the Academy roll out a celebration of television that welcomed every fan, creator, and attendee into the conversation from day one.
Televerse was built to bring the television community together in a fresh way — a gathering where storytellers and audiences could meet face-to-face over the shows, ideas, and moments shaping the medium. For a festival centered on connection, accessibility wasn’t an afterthought. It was part of the blueprint, and we were honored to help bring that vision to life.
Building Accessibility Into Something Brand New
There’s something uniquely exciting about being part of a first-year festival. There’s no playbook, no past edition to compare against — just an opportunity to build best practices and standards from the very beginning.
Throughout Televerse, our platform ran across the festival’s programming, offering live captions on side-stage monitors and direct phone access through scannable QR codes. Attendees could pick whichever option fit them best, whether they preferred glancing at a screen nearby or following along on their own device. However audiences chose to engage, 4ALL.Live met them there.
The Moment That Stopped Us in Our Tracks
Televerse gave our team something we’d been quietly hoping to witness for a long time.
During the festival, we caught a video of a deaf/heard of hearing attendee using 4ALL.Live to follow a live conversation in real time. He was locked in — reading along, reacting, present in the room with everyone else. For a team that spends its days building technology for this exact purpose, watching it actually land with the person it was designed for was a moment that hit differently than any metric ever could.
Damian Petrou, Creative Director at Brave New Media LA and a driving force behind 4ALL, put it best:
“Seeing a hearing-impaired attendee actually using the product in the real world — that was the most impactful part of Televerse for us. It wasn’t translation. It was someone keeping up with the moment because of what we built. That reminded us of the 20% of people who truly need this, and it’s exactly why we keep pushing forward.”
Even better, we got to hear directly from the attendee after the fact. That kind of unfiltered, firsthand feedback is gold — it’s the kind of insight that shapes roadmaps, sharpens features, and reminds the whole team why the smallest details carry the biggest weight.
What the Numbers Keep Telling Us
Event after event, our usage data has revealed a pattern we didn’t fully expect when we first built the platform: accessibility features are being chosen at nearly four times the rate of translation features. It’s a quiet but powerful signal about who this technology matters most to.
Televerse brought that statistic to life. It reminded us that behind every usage graph is a real person choosing to engage on their own terms — and that our job is to keep showing up for them.
Looking Ahead
We are so thankful to the Television Academy for inviting 4ALL to be part of Televerse’s debut. Helping shape the identity of a brand-new festival — and doing it with accessibility front and center — was a genuine honor, and we couldn’t be more excited to see where Televerse goes from here.
As for us, moments like this are the ones that keep the mission sharp. Televerse reminded us exactly who we’re building for, and we’ll carry that clarity into every event, every update, and every new chapter ahead.
Here’s to Televerse, to the Television Academy, and to making sure the moment belongs to everyone in the room.
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