Broadcasters, Pay-TV Operators Resist Tougher Closed Captioning Standards
Broadcast and cable industry groups remain opposed to stricter standards for closed-captioning quality, monitoring and technical, they said in comments filed with the FCC last week. But advocates for people who are hard of hearing or deaf said industrywide standards would help improve the quality of captioning. The commission sought to refresh the record in its proceeding on closed-captioning quality (CD Oct 27 p13) to take into account technological advances since it last addressed the issue, in 2005.
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"Placing unachievable goals on broadcasters will not improve the quality of captions or service to viewers overall,” NAB said in comments filed before Wednesday’s deadline. “A more realistic and productive approach would be to require broadcasters to continue making their best efforts to deliver quality captioned programming, without imposing an arbitrary error rate or some similar benchmark.” NCTA also opposed the quality standards: “Government mandates cannot guarantee perfection and would be the wrong tool to achieve the shared goal of providing the highest quality captions possible."
The FCC’s proposals would hurt pay-TV distributors and fail to improve the quality of captions, DirecTV said. “Real-time monitoring would impose substantial additional costs, both for added technology and for additional human resources,” it said. Because MVPDs receive programming and captions packaged together, they can’t fix non-technical errors such as spelling errors in the captions, it said. “MVPDs should not be held legally responsible for errors that they cannot correct and for which they have relied on the programmers’ certificates of compliance” with the captioning requirements, it said.
The FCC should clarify particular exemptions from closed-captioning requirements for public TV stations, said APTS, PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Financially strapped stations already get exemptions, and the FCC should clarify that multicast channels are separate for the purposes of calculating a station’s revenue for meeting that exemption, they said. “This interpretation would permit public TV stations to provide unique and valuable local multicast programming, even in those circumstances where it would not be financially viable to caption such programming,” the organizations said. Without such an interpretation, stations could not afford to caption all its local programming and “many stations would be forced to cease creating local programming for their multicast channels, particularly live programming” such as coverage of local governmental meetings, they said.
Captioning errors remain pervasive, said the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, which supports adopting standards. Its captioning center has developed technology that can help the FCC set fair levels of expected performance and lower the cost of monitoring and improving captions, it said. Setting quality standards will also reduce the number of complaints received by TV stations, the FCC and consumer advocacy groups, it said.
The FCC should phase out the use of electronic newsroom technique-produced (ENT) captions, which use news scripts and copy from teleprompters, said a coalition of advocates for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, including the National Association of the Deaf and Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. “Without having captioned access to those unscripted on-air discussions, 36 million deaf and hard of hearing members of the public find much of the news to be incomprehensible,” they said. But requiring real-time captioning for news programming would be too expensive for many news operations, the Radio Television Digital News Association said. “ENT strikes a balance between the stations’ desire to provide as much information through captioning as possible and the reality that live captioning is both expensive and logistically challenging.”