Should Digital Movies Be Required To Offer Subtitles?
Normally, I tend to think that most regulations are bad. In a free market, businesses should be allowed to operate with a wide degree of latitude. At the same time there is a pragmatic part of me that understands there can be exceptions to this. Everyone should have the right to free speech, but that doesn’t make it right to run cigarette ads on Saturday morning cartoons or to claim that you’re a Doctor when you only bought your degree from an internet spammer.
For the most part, the television world has been forced to accept reasonable restrictions in exchange for the public bandwidth they use to deliver their content. In the internet world though, the content rules are more like the old west because consumers are opting into the service by paying for it. As long as you have the quickest draw, your behavior doesn’t matter as much and so far companies like Netflix have been more concerned about digital market share, then doing what’s right.
Maybe this is because internet audiences are still small compared to television or it could be that it takes time for rules and standards to develop and emerging markets don’t tend to care about these things. Whatever the reason though, there are parts of the television experience that aren’t making the jump to the internet.
Specifically, I’m talking about closed caption data. For years, television studios have been legally required to provide this information, so that people who are hard of hearing can also enjoy the content. While there are some technical issues associated with adding this kind of data to a movie file, technology is at a point where it could easily support this. The Matroska container for example, is able to include optional sub-title information along with video and audio data. Alternatively, because online delivery can microstream to people, files with the embedded sub-titles could made available to viewers who opted into them. This would involve keeping multiple copies of the same movies though and so far the digital movie industry hasn’t wanted to bear this cost.
While I’m loathe to suggest new regulations on a burgeoning industry, I also feel like we have a responsibility to consider the needs of everyone. It costs companies extra money to include wheel chair ramps at their physical locations, but we pay for that as a society because we want to treat everyone as equally as we can. As the traditional line between telecommunications and entertainment becomes blurred, it’s important that we don’t leave behind those less fortunate in life. Having a law that requires subtitles in order to qualify for DRM legal protections wouldn’t be popular with the entertainment industry, but it would fill a void that the market isn’t interested in addressing. Personally, I don’t know whether or not I’d actually support a legal mandate for firms like Netflix, Amazon and Apple to require this data, but I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the issue.
Update – Interestingly enough, I found out that the FTC is actually hosting a hearing (not sure if there was a pun intended) on this topic on Friday Nov. 6. It sounds like the entertainment industry’s position may not be represented, but they will have several prominent members of the deaf community weigh in on the topic. The event will run from 9am – 1pm EST and will be broadcast on the web at the FTC’s website.
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Davis
Filed under: DRM, Media, Movies, Netflix
Captions are for everyone, whether you for localization, search-ability, modal translation, … We all win.
That’s a good point and one that I hope the market will figure out. Using that caption data to capture search traffic and international audiences could provide an incentive for businesses to provide this on their own, but so far this opportunity seems to have been overlooked by the major providers of online video.
This reflects the lack of vision by content providers of how to monetize digital delivery and its potential reach.
Lynda.com (software training videos) has embraced closed captioning because they know there are many users around the world whose English is not their first language and close-caption is a necessary crutch.
Hulu would make a lot more money selling a subscription to a global audience interested in improving their English with entertainment, that what it makes now on 3-4 commercials per show to laptop-potatoes in the US.
Interesting ideas, but if we follow the idea that niche content appears to be a major part of the future of digital Media. Niche means pin point accuracy. And if I am being that niche, why would I bother with caption data for much of that content. Its for specific people, who most likely can understand and hear. Ie Niche content for non-hearing people would be made in a way they can understand.
Who is going to bother producing caption data, reasonable expensive to do, for content not aimed at those who cannot hear anyway?
I feel captioning will suffer a lot in the future, especially in the niche content area.
James
All good points James. Where exactly do we draw the line. It’s one thing to require captions on broadcast TV, quite another to require them for a YouTube video of your pet that only ten people will see. I’m not sure the best way to address the problem, but since the DMCA rules already give content companies an artificial advantage by restricting control over their content (i.e. illegal to hack the DRM out), one way to deal with this would be to say that in order for your content to qualify for DMCA protection, it must include subtitles with the content. This would let the studios decide and make sure the bigger titles comply. If they don’t the deaf community could always create their own subtitles. As far as the expense goes, I think that this would be relatively minor. Already, many films include them on DVD because of foreign audiences or because they’ve been required to on other platforms and have them laying around. As near as I can tell, the reason why they don’t do the same with online video is that the DRM that they use doesn’t support it. Again, this goes back to the quid pro quo idea of requiring subtitles to qualify for DRM. I don’t want to get in the habit of supporting every niche cause, but at the same time, there are people who choose to watch niche content because they tastes run that way, while deaf people aren’t given the same choice