Consumer Groups, Industry Associations Clash Over Captioning Clips
Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired don’t agree with NAB, NCTA and others on the technical challenges posed by a proposal to require closed captioning for video clips, according to comments filed in response to a Media Bureau public notice on the topic. The notice was issued after consumer groups filed a petition of reconsideration against the FCC’s IP closed captioning order because it didn’t include rules for captioning clips (CD April 19 p11). Since many local and national video programming distributors (VPDs) caption all their news clips, there’s little reason to expect others to face “technical barriers” doing so, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc. (TDI) and seven other consumer groups in a joint filing. The FCC shouldn’t “undermine the success of its IP closed captioning rules by imposing a video clips captioning requirement that would match or exceed the complexity and cost of captioning full-length programming,” said the Digital Media Association.
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The FCC should apply IP closed captioning rules to video clips, said the consumer groups in a report released Monday. “A substantial proportion of IP-delivered content will not be captioned in the absence of rules requiring clips to be captioned,” said TDI, the National Association of the Deaf and six other groups in the joint filing. “The alarmingly high percentage of uncaptioned non-news clips that we observed demonstrates the need for the Commission’s rules to apply to all content types.” The report is a supplement to a similar document released by the same groups in May (CD May 17 p7) as part of the proceeding on IP closed captioning. The study said most excerpted video on the Internet is uncaptioned, but some online video providers caption nearly all their content while others caption nearly none. That suggests it’s “technically feasible” for online video sources to caption their content, and that they will need to be compelled to do so, said the report. The study also found several quality issues with online captions, including a lack of clear identifiers for what content is captioned and what isn’t, and “rampant” problems with synchronization and display in the videos tested for the study.
Captioning online clips “remains a time consuming and labor-intensive process,” said NCTA. Video programming distributors typically have to generate captions for online clips from scratch, because such clips are often created before captions have been applied to the full program, or because the clips includes several disparate pieces of a full program and thus no longer align with the full caption file, said the association. There’s no automated software for encoding high-quality captions for online clips, NAB said. “As a consequence, outside vendors must be hired, and station staff assigned, to ensure that captioning on video clips is properly encoded."
There are even more severe technical challenges involved with captioning online sports highlights, said DirecTV. The DBS provider distributes online clips from the NFL in connection with its Sunday Ticket package. “Attempting to provide captions for them would often result in a product that is garbled to a hearing-impaired viewer, and the delay required to re-caption this content could destroy the value of the service being offered,” DirecTV said.
Several of the filers said the FCC doesn’t have authority to require the captioning of video clips, and that Congress never intended the 21st Century Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) to apply to them. “In the legislative history of the CVAA’s closed captioning requirements, Congress clearly stated its intention for the regulations to apply to full-length programming and not to video clips or outtakes,” said NCTA. The consumer groups and public interest group Public Citizen pointed to a letter from Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Mark Pryor, D-Ark., who helped author the CVAA, that congressional intent was for clips to be captioned. “All companies that produce full-length programs broadcast on television should be required to provide closed captioning on IP-delivered video segments and full length programs,” said Public Citizen. “Any other standard would defeat the central purpose of the CVAA."
NAB, NCTA and other industry commenters said that voluntary online clip captioning efforts underway. “Both network and local stations are voluntarily captioning online video clips as a service to their viewers and as a competitive tool,” said NAB. “Burdening important and timely video content -- especially news clips -- with premature regulation could chill the posting of clips that might otherwise provide important information to consumers,” said NCTA. The consumer groups said the amount of online clips that remain uncaptioned shows that depending on voluntary efforts won’t work. “It is clear that the Commission’s expectations that voluntary captioning would rise to make video clips accessible has not come to fruition,” said the joint filing.
TDI’s petition to reconsider the IP closed captioning order is largely “a complaint that the video programming industry is not doing something that the industry is not yet required to do,” said NAB. “No information presented to date by TDI comes close to demonstrating any denial of access to critical areas of video programming.”