Zillow Showcase video autoplays on mute: add cue captions

Zillow Showcase video autoplays on mute as the second image in the listing carousel, so a walkthrough with no on-screen words says nothing until someone taps. Sume video captions can burn authored cues onto a silent clip without speech-to-text, for $0.20 on a video up to 60 seconds.

Zillow's Showcase Getting Started Guide: Editing listings (read 2026-10-03) describes the autoplay and the 120-second maximum, and says videos cannot include persistent agent or brokerage logos, watermarks or advertising. It does not say anything about captions, so check it before you pick a look.

As with any Showcase file, the photographer uploads through Aryeo, and agents choose from what is uploaded. Sume makes the captioned file; it does not upload it.

Why does a muted autoplay need cues instead of speech captions?

A house walkthrough is usually silent or has a music bed. Sume's speech captions need audible speech: a silent clip fails as caption_no_speech with next_action: use_overlay_captions. The fix the docs give is to pass cues (or segments), each with text, start and end in seconds. That path skips speech-to-text and burns exactly your copy at exactly those times.

script_text, words, cues and segments are mutually exclusive, so pick one per request. SRT uploads are not supported; pass phrase-level text as cues instead.

What does a cue request look like?

Send a public HTTPS video URL and the cues. Three beats cover a short walkthrough: the room, the one fact worth reading, and the close.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: showcase-cues-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/walkthrough.mp4",
    "style": "slam",
    "cues": [
      {"text": "South-facing kitchen", "start": 1, "end": 5},
      {"text": "Island seats four", "start": 6, "end": 10},
      {"text": "Garden through the glass doors", "start": 12, "end": 17}
    ]
  }'

How do I keep the words readable and the rules intact?

Zillow bars persistent marks, so keep each cue short-lived and about the home, never a phone number or brokerage line held on screen. A cue that changes every few seconds reads as a caption; a fixed line reads like a plate.

Style and placement are yours to edit. A style is a set of design tokens, and the optional design field overrides one request, for example placement.anchor_ratio to move the line, or colors.active. If footage is busy, the earlier post on dimming a clip before captions covers the video filter route.

What can go wrong?

Korean copy on slam, punch or tiktok-green is a 400 (caption_hangul_text_latin_style), because those faces have no Hangul glyphs. Pick a Hangul style for Korean cues.

The video URL must be a fetchable public HTTPS file; signed, private and non-HTTPS URLs are rejected. If you need a 120-second tour cut first, run video trim and caption the result. The captioned file arrives as a job result; see Jobs and results. To restyle without a new transcription, pass source_caption_id instead of video_url; billing is unchanged, a restyle is still a render.