Quote:
Originally Posted by HTNut
which doesn't make sense to me. If television sets intended for American audiences must have a system for closed captioning, then what makes it ok to avoid having to do something for streaming television content from the internet?
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The specificity in the regulation, unfortunately. There are numerous other exceptions as well, including an exception that exempts broadcasters from having to provide closed captioning for the first four years that they're operating. Theoretically, to side-step their responsibility to the disabled, broadcasters can simply become "reborn" every four years. (Yes, it goes by the life of network,
not by the life of its parent company. That's why Universal
HD didn't have to provide closed captioning until just a couple of years ago. Luckily, no channel has seen fit to exploit that loop-hole.) Another exception (though I'm not sure if this one is still in place) was for Spanish-language programming: If you were hearing impaired and Latino, you were basically out of luck.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HTNut
i'm far from being tech savvy, but it can't be that difficult to distribute text data along with TV streams for computers or broadband TVs to decode.
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It's actually a lot more difficult than it seems. It isn't a separate transmission. It must be integrated into your
ATSC signal, following
ATSC specifications. Beyond that, the actual captioning process itself is more costly than many distributors would like (I suppose especially since they get comparatively little ROI from that expense). The captioning services are also pretty ruthless in their licensing -- they actually maintain rights over the captions, so it isn't like the distributor could have EIA-608 (analog) captions applied, and then programmatically extract those captions and apply them as EIA-708 (digital) captions.
I've seen someone post the numbers in another thread. I'll try to remember where and see if I can find them.
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