Captioning Shortened Versions of Streamed Shows Remains Issue for FCC
The FCC’s new closed-captioning regulations for TV programs that are streamed using Internet Protocol exempt some shortened versions of the shows from captioning requirements, and that’s causing heartburn at the agency, said Karen Peltz Strauss, deputy chief, FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, at an FCBA conference Wednesday.
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The length of the programming is an issue, Strauss said, because federal lawmakers made clear in report language that, at least for the time being, they intend for the new captioning regulations the agency adopted Jan. 12 to apply to full-length programming, not video clips or outtakes.
Some programming that runs at full length on TV may be conveyed only in shortened form over IP, and thus may be exempt from FCC captioning requirements, Strauss said. “We're going to keep an eye on this.” In a follow-up interview, Strauss also made clear that the agency wants the industry to heed the spirit of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which brought about the new captioning regulations. “We want to make sure that what’s put on television is generally accessible [over IP], and we consider the accessibility of news programming for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to be of considerable importance,” Strauss said.
As the FCC moves to implement the law, Strauss said another concern for the agency is that increasing use of the HDMI, may be undermining the quality of the captioning available. During the panel discussion, Julie Kearney, CEA vice president-regulatory affairs, said industry executives are looking into interconnection issues. “This is a hot topic,” Kearney said. “Because we're sitting down, hopefully things will work out in an optimum way for everybody."
Strauss told us that, despite the program-length and HDMI issues, the FCC is not planning to ask Congress to provide a legislative fix. “We're just going to implement the rules as we're directed to by Congress,” Strauss said. “One thing I think we've done is we've highlighted the interconnection issue, so we will hope for the industry to respond to the accessibility needs on its own."
The Adobe Flash-based system that the Peacock Network has been using to stream programming on NBC.com may require too much power to be practical for use with smaller, battery-operated mobile device, said panelist Margaret Tobey, NBCUniversal vice president-regulatory affairs. “The [NBC] engineers see this as a challenge,” Tobey said. “It’s just the [FCC implementation] deadlines that have them nervous more than anything."
Mark Richert, director of public policy for the American Foundation for the Blind, predicted that the rollout of video description services will result in increased demand for the feature, and not just among the blind and visually impaired.
"I think he’s right,” Strauss said later. “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to this kind of access. Most people don’t know what video description services are.” But NCTA Senior Vice President-Program Network Policy Jill Luckett said, “We're going to have to wait and see. I don’t think we have enough experience with video description yet to know."
Strauss said the FCC’s new rules on the closed captioning of IP-delivered programming are likely to be published in the Federal Register within several weeks. The video description rules, which essentially reinstate agency regulations that were thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2002, were adopted by the FCC Aug. 24 and start phasing in this July.