Saturday, April 6, 2013

New captioning rules start

New FCC captioning rules have kicked this month, requiring cable and broadcast stations to caption streaming video on the Internet. Some broadcasters are complaining it is taking more bandwidth and money than they initially expected. These new rules, part of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, only apply to full-length programs that were broadcast with captions. The clock has starting ticking on two other captioning deadlines:

1. Broadcasters will have a year to get all live or near live TV shows to have captioning when delivered online.

2. The other deadline is a requirement to get all archived online video originally broadcast with captions to be captioned whenever these videos are delivered over the internet. Video producers have two years to get this project complete.

There also has to be a mechanism for alleging violation of the rules.