MVPDs, Programmers, Consumer Groups at Odds Over Responsibility for Captions
Consumer groups representing the hearing impaired and video programmers disagree with pay-TV distributors over who should be held responsible for the quality and other aspects of closed captions, according to reply comments filed Tuesday in docket 05-231 (http://bit.ly/1nCSvLs) in response to an FCC FNPRM on the issue (CD May 1 p9). Charter Communications, Comcast and DirecTV support a “burden shifting” model that puts the onus for quality on programmers, while CBS and Viacom, along with consumer groups like Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, don’t think the current system holding video distributors responsible should be changed. Distributors are “in a better position to police the captioning practices” of programmers than the FCC, the consumer groups said.
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Under Comcast’s burden-shifting scheme, multichannel video programming distributors would still be the front line of consumer complaints about captions, but any issues not relating to the distribution of captions -- such as quality, placement, accuracy -- would be passed on to programmers. Content companies “typically are the entities with the most direct control over the quality of closed captioning of their program,” Comcast said (http://bit.ly/1ov0j42), a viewpoint echoed in comments by Charter (http://bit.ly/1lRMyG6) and DirecTV (http://bit.ly/1kLZuRe) and supported in the reply comments filed by the American Cable Association (http://bit.ly/1pkRx8N).
Verizon took the shift one step further, saying consumers should be able to directly contact the FCC and programmers and MVPDs over captioning issues (http://bit.ly/TV0R6F). The FCC shouldn’t require a process that “forces” consumers to “funnel” complaints to companies that can’t “readily” address them, Verizon said. Putting programmers on the front lines to receive complaints would incentivize them to police their own captions, Verizon said.
The consumer groups, which included the National Association for the Deaf, are “unpersuaded” that dividing caption responsibility between programmers and MVPD will lead to better captions, they said (http://bit.ly/1heJzMa). Neither side has provided enough evidence in the record to support changing the current policy, the consumer groups said. The FCC should either make both groups jointly responsible or confine responsibility to MVPDs, and avoid changing any of its existing captioning rules, the consumer groups said. Changing the responsibility rules would “gamble with the civil rights” of the hearing impaired, they said.
CBS and Viacom also argued against changing the responsibility rules. Shifting the responsibility to programmers would be “arbitrary and capricious,” Viacom said (http://bit.ly/1toodvL). The current model allows MVPDs and programmers to collaborate on solving caption issues, and changing it would hurt consumers, they said.
MVPDs should have a “safe harbor” to address and correct a captioning complaint before the FCC takes enforcement action, ACA said. The commission should also take an MVPD’s size into account when dealing with captioning complaints, said smaller MVPD Cincinnati Bell Extended Territories (http://bit.ly/1kowIGN). If smaller MVPDs can show that a captioning problem doesn’t originate with them, the FCC should take over the investigation of the complaint, Cincinnati Bell said. It said such a procedure would be “critically important” to allow smaller MVPDs to “avoid disputes and unaffordable battles with much larger programmers.”