Closed Captioning Mandate Spurs Busine For Vendors

Broadcasters and video distributors are finding new ways to leverage financial and operational benefits of supporting those with hearing disabilities.

New York With the government mandate for adding closed captions to all video content, whether delivered on television or online now past, TV stations and video distributors have been working hard to comply. The rules apply to both HD and SD TV shows, films, commercials, live news broadcasts, and Video on Demand (VOD) libraries. Failure to comply with the new captioning regulates may result in fines, penalties, and/or rejection of a show by a broadcast facility or MPVD operator.

In fact, the FCC has required most television programming to be captioned since 1997. In 2010, this requirement was extended to all programming delivered online that was also being delivered over traditional TV platforms.

The new rules in 2014 modify these past mandates to address the issue of closed caption quality. The FCC breaks this down into the basic components that make captioning understandable and useful to the audience: 1) the captionings word accuracy and completeness with respect to the audio program; 2) its accuracy of synchronization with the audio program; and 3) its placement on the screen to maximize readability and minimize disruption to the visual program.

Broadcasters have to be most careful with captions during live sporting events.

Bill McLaughlin, Vice President of Product Development at EEG Enterprises, in Farmingdale, N.Y., said the new Report and Order defines the criteria for acceptable closed caption quality in much more detail than any previous document, and includes a detailed set of Best Practices to ensure that the highest possible level of captioning is achieved on both live and pre-recorded programming.

Video Distributors Have Options

Suppliers of the required software and hardware technology interviewed for this article all report increased business, due to the new law, and that their customers are finding new ways to leverage financial and operational benefits (if there are any) of supporting those with hearing disabilities. Most stations follow local regulations on closed captioning as a public service condition of their license and can face sanctions (fines, loss of operating license) for failure to do so.

[More information regarding the mandate can be found here]

Adding closed captioning to programming is not just a regulatory issue, it also can engage and attract new audiences and help monetize content across various platforms, said Mohammad Shihadah, CEO of Apptek, headquartered in McLean, Virginia. The company offers a full range of automated transcription and translation software for closed captioning, subtitling and metadata creation for broadcast and web use to help stations around the world comply with different (although similar) government mandates. Additionally, AppTeks closed captioning creates rich metadata for media monitoring and search engine optimization for archives.

Apptek

One product, designed for live closed captioning applications, is AppTeks fully automated Omnifluent Live Closed Captioning Appliance, which is a piece of hardware running Omnifluent Media software that the company said delivers same-language captions for live content with accuracy and speed that match or eclipse those produced by a human at a fraction of the cost.

Using Omnifluent Media software, AppTek customers can create fully automated, same-language captions for offline content in 11 languages in near real-time.

AppTek designed this Appliance to reside at the broadcasters facility and easily integrate with their existing production workflow, Shihadah said. Through customization for speakers and language, AppTeks Appliance can deliver captions with an average accuracy of 90 percent or higher and an average latency of six seconds.

Indeed, accuracy and speed are critical elements of captioning a live or any other type of event. So, as a whole, have most stations complied with the new mandates? Well, according to the vendors we spoke to, its complicated. To do it right, implementation takes planning, time and money.

EEG

This is a difficult question to answer, because many of the Best Practices are qualitative in nature, and so compliance isnt a simple yes-or-no in all cases, EEGs McLaughlin said. The FCC Report & Order did not mandate quantitative targets for word accuracy or caption latency, though they did issue a FNPRM (Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) indicating that this option was on the table for the future if stakeholders, including consumer advocacy groups, did not believe significant improvements were being made through the existing guidelines.

He said there are definitely some aspects of the mandate that require changes at many stations, particularly those outside of the top 25 markets that use teleprompters/newsroom computers for most of their live captioning. The new mandate is very specific that all segments of newscasts must be captioned, including weather and field reports, which in most cases are not in the teleprompting system, McLaughlin said. This is going to require stations to use scarce existing staff to create transcripts and enter them into the system, or to develop relationships with professional captioning companies to get the segments done.

EEG offers cloud computing as part of its captioning and subtitling portfolio.

Another important new requirement, he said, is that the accuracy category defined by the FCC specifically includes captioning of non-verbal audio cues like sound effects, music, and off-screen speaker identification. This is a big problem for any stations that are attempting to create live with operator-less voice recognition systems. Even if the system meets accuracy targets for spoken words, it isnt going to help at all with description of non-verbal sounds. Only

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