Industry, Consumer Groups Spar at FCC Over Closed Captions
The FCC shouldn’t tell video distributors how often to check their closed captioning equipment or tighten rules for live and near-live captioning, said NAB, NCTA and other industry commenters in reply comments filed Friday in docket 05-231 in response to an FCC rulemaking on video closed captioning quality. Though the commission created caption quality standards in February, it also issued a Further NPRM seeking comments on some deferred issues from the rulemaking (CD Feb 21 p5).
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Video programming distributors should be held to high standards of customer service and quality for closed captions, said a joint filing from the National Association for the Deaf, the Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and many other consumer groups representing the hearing impaired (http://bit.ly/XXVy89). Since the commission’s caption quality rules were only recently created and haven’t taken effect yet, it’s too early for the FCC to be applying more captioning rules to VPDs, said DirecTV. The FCC “should not adopt additional rules before it has had the opportunity to ascertain the effectiveness of those it just enacted,” DirecTV said (http://bit.ly/1uHJ0wH).
Industry commenters all objected to proposals that would require real-time outage reporting and FCC mandated regular checks for closed caption services and equipment. “Such a requirement would do more harm than good because it would force video programmers to deploy resources to report an outage instead of working to remedy one,” said NAB (http://bit.ly/1ukc3sz). Smaller multichannel video programming distributors would be disproportionately burdened because they would have to meet compliance deadlines at a much higher cost per subscriber than larger companies, said Cincinnati Bell (http://bit.ly/XdAQBo). An FCC standardized requirement on reporting and checking captioning could limit innovation, said Comcast, which uses a unique “probe” system to diagnose problems on its systems. “The probe technology that Comcast is deploying monitors for caption impairments on an ongoing basis, making periodic equipment checks unnecessary,” Comcast said (http://bit.ly/1oEqbtF). The FCC should require VPDs to check captioning equipment just as often as they check audio equipment, said the joint consumer group filing.
The FCC could further improve caption quality by requiring live and near-live programming to be broadcast with a short delay of several seconds to allow captioners to have a slight head start in captioning the footage, the consumer groups said. Forcing companies to do that “would be dictating substantive journalistic editorial choices based on the type and timing of the broadcast programming” said NAB. Other industry commenters argued that such delays would disrupt DVRs, programming guides and the timeliness of emergency information. Programmers have already pledged to “utilize both pre-recorded captions” and “make reasonable efforts to employ live display captioning where possible,” NAB said. The commission should allow the industry effort to take effect and examine whether closed caption quality has improved before imposing more rules on captioning live and near live programming, NAB said.
Requests from consumer groups that the FCC eliminate captioning exemptions, including those for ads under five minutes, late-night programming and public service announcements, could threaten local stations’ ability to provide local programming, said NAB. Industry arguments that the exemptions are financially necessary are based on old economic data and haven’t been supported in the current record, the consumer groups said. “Perpetually denying viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing the civil right of equal access to video programming on the basis of a thin economic record gathered more than 15 years ago ... would be a profound miscarriage of the Commission’s responsibilities,” said the joint filing. Conversely, the record doesn’t contain any support for eliminating the exemptions, NCTA argued (http://bit.ly/1kXrSTl).
The commission shouldn’t require special closed captioning standards for 3D or Ultra HD TVs, NAB and other industry commenters said. “Government intrusion in this process at this time would impede rather than assist this captioning effort,” NAB said. The FCC doesn’t need to “deeply intervene” in standards-setting processes for that technology, but the agency should “set forth basic functional requirements to ensure that these formats accommodate captions from the outset,” the consumer groups said.