Extend CVAA Deadlines for Broadcasters and Cable Operators, FCC Asked

Public broadcasters, too, said they're not now ready to pass along audio descriptions of action that’s not captioned because it’s not part of dialogue. The two DBS companies and AT&T were among those that sought to keep an exemption, so MVPDs using secondary audio streams for other services need not provide a third stream containing video descriptions. An advocacy group for the blind was the only one filing initial comments in docket 11-43 asking the commission to go beyond what’s required by the letter of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

CEA and Dolby Labs disagree on what standard the FCC should use in implementing part of the act. The commission also sought comment in March on updating its rules to account for a revised Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) A/53 digital standard. It proposed to use “A/53 Part 5:2010 in order to ensure that video description can be received by all DTV receivers.” CEA backs that approach, it said. Dolby meanwhile continued to push a different approach (CED April 15 p9), which the company contends will save bandwidth and improve audio quality for those with trouble hearing.

Many cable networks don’t now provide video descriptions, making it a “new and challenging undertaking,” the NCTA said. As did the AT&T, CEA, Verizon and others, the association said the coming requirement that some programming have those descriptions would require coordination between MVPDs, CE companies and others, and that MVPDs’ role is limited. “Certain preparations cannot start until the Commission finalizes its proposed rules,” so “the compliance schedule proposed by the Commission does not allow sufficient time for industry implementation to succeed,” the NCTA said. That “could ultimately disappoint and cause undue frustration for consumers seeking the described video."

Waiting until next October to require big network affiliates in major markets to start providing what amounts to about 4 hours weekly of video descriptions during primetime and kids programming is a “convenient and logical date,” the NAB said. Oct. 1 is the start of the fall broadcast TV season, the association noted. And “due to the substantial expense of outfitting” a station to pass along video descriptions, the FCC “should only apply the rules to stations once they are technically capable, rather than requiring them to become technically capable upon enactment of the rules,” NAB said.

Forty-seven percent of U.S. public TV stations aren’t broadcasting a second audio service, which often is used for video descriptions, the Association of Public TV Stations, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS said jointly. “Many of these stations do not have the technical ability to pass a second audio service through their facilities,” they said. “These public stations will require a reasonable length of time to build out their infrastructures to allow the pass-through capability.”

The FCC should continue to use the secondary audio program exception because DBS companies’ satellite capacity constraints make the exception as important now as it was 10 years ago, said Dish Network and DirecTV in a joint filing. The exception allows entities that use the SAP channel for other program-related purposes, such as a translation, to continue using it for that purpose. Required carriage of both Spanish audio and video description would likely force major system modifications, because the DBS systems are designed to include only a single secondary audio channel, they said. Both companies’ older set-top boxes will have implementation issues due to an inability to create a video description menu, they said. They'll set up a system to ensure that the owners of the older boxes will know how to activate video descriptions. The DBS companies also requested that video descriptions be identified in the same way programming with closed captioning is, rather than using the program system information protocol.

Among cable programmers, Disney on behalf of ESPN and News Corp. on behalf of Fox News Channel said those networks ought to be exempt from a list of the top-five rated cable programmers to have at least 50 hours quarterly of video descriptions. That’s because those channels have a lot of real-time and near-live programming. The NAB said programming should fall under that exemption if it’s delivered to a broadcast network in edited form less than seven days after being created.

The DTV transition and addition of new delivery methods have made TV broadcasting delivery far more complex and increased availability of programming outside top markets, said the American Council of the Blind. The FCC should establish a rule “that requires all covered networks to ensure that whenever the described content prepared for prime time or children’s broadcasting is made available via Internet, all such content has accompanying audio description,” the council said. It said the agency should also use Internet delivery as a factor in establishing markets and networks that will be covered by the rules.

What the regulator proposed lacks an option of allowing a mix to be used in DTV receivers, allowed under the 2007 version of the ATSC standard the commission seeks to update, Dolby said. “The broadcast mix mode described in A/53 Part 5:2010 does not provide the best delivery of video description and Dolby is concerned that the exclusive incorporation into the FCC’s rules of broadcast mix as described in A/53 Part 5:2010 could foreclose the opportunity to better serve the visually-impaired audience,” it said. The company asked the FCC “to avoid drafting the rules in such a way as to prevent the subsequent evolution to a ‘receiver-mix’ solution."

CEA said the newer standard should be used, instead of mixing the narrative audio track with the regular audio track in a receiver. The older version Dolby seeks “was abandoned in 2010” with adoption of A/53 Part 5:2010 “for good reason and with the consent and approval of the ATSC,” it said. “The industry has learned that an overabundance of options leads to different implementation choices and possible failure to interoperate.” Last year’s revision came after “careful deliberation on the best way to encode and signal the presence of audio streams” including video descriptions, it said.