At present, the FCC exempts new networks from captioning for the first four years of operation. This rule MUST change or be eliminated!!! It is downright ridiculous and unfair to the deaf community now that there are so many captioning service providers!According to their petition to the FCC for a partial captioning exemption, ReelzChannel has tens of millions of dollars in investment, but has petitioned the FCC for a partial exemption "to be relieved of the obligation to pass through captioning of already captioned programs" due to undue burden. See the image opposite.
To add insult to injury, they say that passing through previously existing closed captioning would be of "little value" to deaf and hard of hearing viewers. They think that the presence of closed captions on previously captioned program segments would be confusing.
Oh, and they say on page 7 of their petition, that they are committed to providing closed captioning for their originally produced programming "no later" than four years after they start - and the start date was September 27, 2006. And they have the nerve to say
that they expect the FCC to be "especially protective" of them as a new,
independent network.
3 comments:
I'm curious about what they mean, 'passing through captioning of already captioned programs, and claiming it is an undue burden?
For a while, I've noticed that some captioning actually carried a copyright notice; Is that what they meant, by claiming undue burden in carrying captioning on already captioned programs? (i.e., having to purchase captioning rights.) Or is it merely the cost of providing the equipment necessary to rebroadcast line-21 captioning?
When I got DishTV. I was excited because I would be getting the new stand-alone channel called 'NFL Network' and boy I was tremendously disappointed that it wasn't captioned. The FCC is hurting us more than it is hurting them.
Anonymous,
what is meant by passing through the captioning of already captioned programs means that for example, if they are showing a clip from the movie "Gone with the Wind," and that clip already had captions before, they don't want to have to pass through those captions or re-caption the clip because of formatting issues. Even if something was captioned before, the captions may not show up because of different formats and changes in the time codes.
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