CBS, Time Warner, Viacom and other media companies...
CBS, Time Warner, Viacom and other media companies urged the FCC to reject a proposal from Comcast that involves a “burden-shifting” enforcement model for compliance with the TV closed captioning rules. Comcast hasn’t adequately explained “why the commission should depart…
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from its longstanding policy of enforcing the television closed captioning rules” against multichannel video programming distributors, the companies said in a filing in docket 05-231 (http://bit.ly/1hgMeEH). To the extent that a video programming provider’s failure to provide compliant captions in its programming is the basis for a consumer complaint, the VPP “is contractually liable to the MVPD by virtue of closed captioning obligations that are imposed on the VPP pursuant to the carriage agreement between the MVPD and VPP,” the filing said. It would be “arbitrary” and “capricious” for the FCC to reverse course “and suddenly directly subject program suppliers to television closed caption obligations, especially where the facts and circumstances underlying a policy have not changed, without a showing based on good reasons,” it said.