Quality standards for TV closed captions could remedy...
Quality standards for TV closed captions could remedy a lack of competition in closed captioning, said captioning company Media Captioning Services (MCS) in an ex parte filing released Monday (http://bit.ly/12yPlLl). “Quality standards are a necessary -- though not a sufficient…
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-- remedy for the anticompetitive behavior and sourcing practices of [Video Programmers] which are designed to debase, commoditize, and lower the value of real-time captioning services,” said MCS Executive Vice President Richard Pettinato in the filing. Large programmers are sourcing all their captioning needs from just a few large companies, Pettinato said, squeezing the smaller companies out. He said stricter standards for captions would give smaller captioning companies a point of competition with the larger ones: quality. “If quality is not a factor in the RFP process, [small companies] will not remain in the business, nor will they have the ability to hire new captioners at wages they will find minimally acceptable,” said Pettinato. The FCC should consider monitoring and imposing restrictions into how programmers distribute their captioning needs, Pettinato said. “We would hope the FCC would require [video programmers] to use smaller, mid-size companies for a percentage of their captioning business, and if they do not use smaller, woman and/or minority-owned businesses for closed captioning, to weight this heavily in renewing licenses of their owned and operated companies,” said the ex parte filing.