Is the Deaf Community Out of Patience?

And if they are, who can blame them? After waiting for two years for Netflix to add captions to its streamed media, the reaction to Netflix's public statement that they will have captions on their streamed media in "about a year." I admit to feeling some impatience myself because a year seems like a long time! The older you are, the longer a year seems to be.

Here is a sampling of the reaction thus far via Facebook, blogs, and Twitter:

On the Facebook group Netflix Watch-Instantly Needs Closed Captions! someone wrote that they had called to complain, and the people they spoke to seemed "irritated."

On Twitter, @deafpundit writes: might have to make Silverlight more stable for #captions, but a year to do that? Rubbish. @queenalpo wrote: Excuses, excuses. @jaredevans wrote: Silverlight is just a programming platform. It can support captions if you develop it. @jaredevans also wrote: I'm still digesting the Netflix response. One year isn't a reasonable time frame to get started with a few movies captioned.

Marlee Matlin especially seems to be out of patience with Netflix. She has been tweeting her heart out on Twitter, beseeching her 10,000 plus followers to pressure Netflix to add captions to their streaming media (thanks Marlee!).

On Netflix's own blog, the comments clearly reflect the impatience: People urging Netflix to dump Silverlight (which is not likely to happen because Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, is on Microsoft's board!) ; people claiming that the technology already exists to make Silverlight caption-capable, and even complaints from hearing people who want the captions.

In the deaf blogosphere (so far):

Give us a better answer, Netflix. Not looking at the gift horse in the mouth, but the fact you’re letting your own “constraints” affect customer service. - from Meryl Evans

Even the hearing blogosphere seems to reflect some impatience with Netflix:

If Hulu [Hulu uses Flash, not Silverlight] could figure out how to do it, Netflix can. If they didn’t want to re-encode everything, they should have solved this earlier. - Digital Media Bytes

If the deaf community is upset now, just wait until a year from now if Netflix doesn't keep its announced commitment. Meanwhile, the issue is actually broader than just Netflix! We need legislation to mandate captions on the Internet. To promote THAT objective as well as the Netflix objective and helping Hulu to expand their captioning, a companion Facebook group has been set up with a discussion board: Internet Captioning.

Update: Tonight Robert suggested that we adopt the name Caption Action 2 for our fight for captioning on the Internet. The first Caption Action, in late 80s, was for captions on home video. Now it is 2009 and time for another Caption Action - but this time, call it Caption Action 2.