Last January, I made a post on DeafDC.com, where I am a regular commentator, about the need for online captioning of videos, shows, and movies provided by network channels and websites such as Netflix.com, and Amazon.com's Unbox video service. I am resubmitting my DeafDC.com post below with an additional commentary on the latest steps taken on this important matter.
January 17, 2007
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in which numerous companies such as Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and Sony revealed their latest products designed to revolutionize consumer use, the needs of deaf and hard of hearing consumers were largely neglected.
Many of those products have combined TV programming with related content from the Internet. Companies are also planning to distribute media through the Internet that can be uploaded to laptops, computers, media players, and flat screen televisions. None of these products are accessible for deaf and hard of hearing people. Companies are not required under federal law to provide captioning on the Internet, which means any media they create for the Internet such as television shows, videos, and other forms of entertainment will not be captioned at all.
Network television shows such as The Office, LOST, 24, and many others are now available for download on iTunes. If you upload a particular episode onto your video iPod (or soon to be iPhone), you’re out of luck. The same goes for uploading popular network shows onto your laptop even though your media player (such as Windows Media Player) has closed caption features.
Clearly these companies do not even think about deaf and hard of hearing people as a consumer demographic in their discussions about revolutionizing the Internet through streaming media. One such company is Netflix. They recently announced an "instant watching" service in which a Netflix user can watch a movie that is streamed over the Internet. Here are some small snippets from the press release:
Netflix will expand its service to include digital downloads of rented movies to subscribers’ computers via the Internet at no additional cost.
The number of hours of online viewing will be dictated by the type of subscription.
We named our company Netflix because we believed Internet-based movie rental represented the future, first as a means of improving service and selection, and then as a means of movie delivery," said the firm’s chief executive, Reed Hastings.
I decided to find out if the "instant watching" service offered closed captioning for popular movies such as Jackass. I looked at the Netflix DVD title for Jackass, and it had the closed captioned symbol. Then I looked at the Jackass movie version offered in the "instant watching" service. It did not have the closed captioned symbol.
I fired off an email to Customer Service at Netflix:
"To: customerservice@netflix.com
Subject: Instant watching: Video Playback
Subject: Customer Service
I’ve noticed that you have introduced a new service that allows Netflix users to watch movies that are streamed over the Internet. However, as a deaf consumer, the movies offered for instant watching do not have the closed captioning symbol. The movie, "Jackass," which is offered on the instant watching list does not have the closed captioning symbol where the DVD itself (typically rented through the mail) does have the closed captioning symbol.
Does this mean that movies offered in the instant watching list will not have closed-captioning? I look forward to hearing from you as a loyal deaf Netflix fan.
Thanks!
And a few hours later, I got this response from Customer Service:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Netflix.com customer support!
We appreciate you taking the time to provide us with your feedback and comments. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience you’ve experienced. Currently, our instant viewing movies do not have closed captioning.
We may offer this in the future but do not have a time frame for this. Please be assured that we are continually striving to improve our service.
We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Netflix Customer Service
The Internet is leaving us behind, which is ironic, because it has also revolutionized the deaf and hard of hearing community. What can we do as deaf consumers to make sure that we are considered as a valuable demographic that companies should consider when designing their products?
We have to lobby our lawmakers, and organizations such as NAD and AGB should get together to create a coalition to address this issue. It would be nice if we could reach out to the large companies as well to gain their support in creating legislation that require all telecommunications companies and media companies to provide captioning on all forms of media. This will be an uphill fight, of course, since we just finished the battle to caption all television shows.
Oh, and I urge you to let Customer Service at Netflix know what you think of their decision to not offer closed captioning for their "instant watching" service. And if you’re a Netflix customer, you’re paying for a service you can’t access!
And since then, there were advances made in adding closed captions or subtitles to online videos. Recently, CNET.com made online captioning history as the first video service to provide captions for their videos. Here is the link to their video announcement!
Also, there are several other websites that have provided captioning for their online videos. Many of those videos are submitted by readers and captioned by request, and one such website that does this is www.projectreadon.com. They've captioned videos for free that are submitted as requests.
The people behind www.projectreadon.com have partnered with Democratic presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson to caption their political advertisements and videos. They also tried to approach Republican presidential candidates to caption their videos, but they were turned down. Senator Tom Harkin, in his Senate re-election campaign, also partnered with www.projectreadon.com to caption his videos.
Other websites include dotsub.com, aol.com, which has a very limited selection of captioned videos, and if you go to google.com and search for "captioned videos," you'll see a list of videos with captions but those are put on by the users themselves, not the website.
I would like to see videos captioned online produced by network channels, and popular websites that offer movies and TV shows as downloads to have them captioned. Current law does not require captioning of online media content produced by movie studios, network channels, and cable. In addition, if such content were captioned, and then put up on iTunes, I could be able to watch captioned videos on my iPhone or laptop. For those that say it's not possible to have captions on videos on handheld media players, it's entirely possible to do so, and many deaf people have hacked those video files to add in captioning files and were able to watch them with captions.
I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter, and thank you for taking the time to read this diary!