Wide Array of Video Captioning Problems Found in First FCC Study

The FCC found a wide array of video captioning problems in a first-of-its-kind study of all complaints to the commission about broadcast-TV and subscription-video programming in the 52 weeks through May 7. Equipment from broadcasters, cable operators and DBS providers had technical problems, and so did set-top boxes, said a report on digital closed captions by the Office of Engineering and Technology and the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. They studied 107 complaints to the FCC.

Advocates for people with disabilities said the survey pointed up areas where industry needs to improve so video captions always can be fully seen by viewers. The report stemmed from work begun just before last year’s full-power broadcast DTV transition, when Michael Copps was the interim chairman (CED May 19/09 p2). It was released on paper by the commission Monday, as the regulator is accepting comments on captioning, and it will be posted online, agency officials said. The report was presented Oct. 27 to the last meeting of a DTV captioning and video description group begun under Copps, said Deputy Chief Karen Peltz Strauss of the bureau. A new FCC advisory group being formed to implement the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act will get video descriptions under its purview, she said.

The FCC analysis “confirms that caption failures can occur at various points on the transmission path along which captions travel -- from the origination source to the viewer,” the study said. The research “raises concerns about how,” and how much, broadcasters and pay-TV providers “are proactively monitoring or otherwise ensuring that their viewing audiences are receiving complete and intact closed captions,” it said. That’s because in several instances TV station staffers didn’t notice that captioning had failed for “many hours,” the study said. Some video programming distributors (VPD) said they plan to install new caption monitoring systems, it added. “In situations where captions were lost for extended periods of time, it would appear that captions received priority far lower than the picture or sound, as it is unlikely that loss of picture or sound would go unnoticed for hours.” VPDs attributed 37 complaints, 35 percent of the total, to issues at their facilities.

NCTA believes that “the low number of complaints over the course of a one-year period does seem to indicate that current system is working well,” a spokesman said. The complaints studied by the FCC include all that it received about captioning during the year reviewed, Peltz Strauss said. CEA and NAB representatives had no comment right away.

Eighteen complaints related to set-top boxes supplied by cable or satellite companies, and 16 of them, 15 percent of all captioning complaints, were resolved by replacing the box, the commission said. “In at least two of these cases the set-top box replacement (with a different brand) was intended as a temporary solution while the manufacturer of the original box developed a software upgrade to solve the problem.” Complaints about satellite receivers included ones relating to errors that put network programming out of sync with captions, the FCC said. “No obvious patterns emerged regarding network, broadcaster, satellite, or cable company equipment (outside of the consumer’s home) that were identified as causing captioning problems."

The study didn’t find systemic captioning problems, instead turning up “isolated instances” that had often resulted from failure to monitor captioning, Peltz Strauss told us. Problems involving set-top boxes were mostly related to those devices, she said. “In the vast majority of cases, there was a successful resolution, because it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out,” she said. “Most often it was a very easy fix, a technically feasible fix,” and “because there were no patterns, we didn’t need a group to monitor those patterns,” she added. Peltz Strauss said she’s unsure whether the commission will study future captioning complaints, a decision that will be based partly on comments received in response to a public notice seeking to refresh the record from a 2005 order. “We want to see what’s happening with respect to the quality of captions."

Advocates for people who are deaf or hard of hearing hope that the report is a springboard for the FCC to work with industry to improve captioning, several of them said. Executive Director Claude Stout of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is “optimistic that with the results of the report, the FCC will work with consumer groups, the TV industry and TV/computer/set top equipment manufacturers to achieve reliable measures and standards in interoperability and quality that would reduce/eliminate such errors in captioning on TV programs as well in the future with those on the Internet,” he said. “We look forward to a near future in which we would not need to file ad hoc complaints on such captioning errors.”

Closed-captioning problems aren’t new, and the “frustration” of those who rely on them has grown with the DTV transition, which “brought numerous new complications,” said Executive Director Cheryl Heppner of the Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Persons. “The report reinforces what consumers have been saying all along, that caption issues are happening at many points in the process. I am hopeful that this will be a catalyst for the industry to pay serious attention to what consumers have long requested: The monitoring of captions from creation to delivery in our homes, so that we will no longer need to spend time and energy reporting the problems.”