Last week, in the Links of the Day for April 27th, I mentioned an article on Macworld.com where they discussed the options coming for Mobile TV. You may have seen my grades for closed caption accessibility for the services discussed in that article. Here they are again for your convenience, with expanded comments by yours truly:
Bitbop – F (owned by Fox, will offer TV shows from Fox, NBC Universal, Discovery, etc.)
FLO TV – F (Owned by Qualcomm, provides wireless over the air TV using the bandwidth where the old analog UHF channels were)
MobiTV – F (They are privately held, and have links with all the major carriers to provide video.)
Netflix – C (They’ve seen the writing on the wall, DVD media is gonna go away sometime, so they have gotten into the business of streaming movies. They recently announced CC support. It’s not 100% there, but its a good start.)
Hulu – B (The best web streaming site constantly updated with recent shows and some movies, and pretty good captioning support, even though not everything is captioned, unfortunately. Preferences can be set to always turn on captions, so you don’t miss a couple of seconds at the beginning as you scramble to turn them on.) F (The mobile version fails. There is no mention that caption support will be available on the mobile version when they come out with it.)
Boxee – N/A (I’m giving Boxee a pass here – they are more of an aggregator of web video content, rather than a direct provider. Hulu is different because it is owned by the companies who provide the content. However, Boxee does provide some subtitle lookup and support. They are also coming out with the Boxee Box, a set top box. )
U-Verse Mobile – F (AT&T’s U-Verse home service has problems with CC’ing Video on Demand too, that’s worth a C+)
Pearl Mobile DTV – D (A press release apparently mentions a demo of closed captioning, but nothing concrete regarding real availability.)
Other services mentioned in the MacWorld article are iTunes and MLB.com At Bat 2010. Both services provide content that when available on TV (iTunes offers TV shows and Movies, MLB.com offers broadcasts of baseball games) is usually closed captioned.
MLB.com At Bat 2010 – F (Many of these broadcasts are already captioned on TV/cable. Should not be too hard to implement, and there’s no excuse. MLB makes too much money to make excuses.)
iTunes Movies – B- (Apple has the technology to provide captions, and some movies have been captioned, but that number is barely growing, if that. Wish Apple would be more proactive with this, especially after seeing they are aggressively curating the App Store, and are able to require specific terms from developers. Apple can’t just point to the providers, who have no excuse, especially Disney, whose biggest shareholder is the big boss-man of Apple. The providers already have the content captioned at least for DVD/BluRay. How hard is it to move that to iTunes movies?)
iTunes TV shows – F (NO tv shows are captioned on iTunes. We will reuse the same argument as for iTunes Movies, and it’s even worse – all new TV content is required to be captioned. Timecodes and advertising, oh please. You already re-do the captions for DVD/BluRay releases. Do it for iTunes too. Apple, can’t you do something already?)
What about YouTube, you say? Yeah, we can’t forget the 900lb gorilla of online video. ;) Captioning their videos was possible back in 2006. Google then recently introduced captioning technology for their videos on a limited basis, and even more recently, opened up this auto-caption capability to all videos on their site.
YouTube – B+ (Automated captions in their desktop Flash client mean everything can be captioned, but it doesn’t mean everything is understandable. The technology is in place, but doesn’t Google have a mechanism to provide feedback regarding the captions (think of the shared spam filter in Gmail) in a crowdsource fashion? Their beta H.264 player has amnesia, forgetting many features present in the Flash player, including captions.) F (The mobile version fails on the iPhone OS platform. There’s a dedicated YouTube app, and the iPhone was the first mobile device to take advantage of YouTube’s H.264-encoded videos. No excuse for leaving out captions. Apple has technology to enable it, Google has great engineers.)
As it can’t already be more obvious, the status of mobile TV/video captioning is horrendous, with non-mobile services barely any better. Even though some of these services appear to be using regular television airwaves, they do not seem to provide any closed captioning. Wouldn’t that be a serious problem with the FCC?
For now, the best we can do is to educate and advocate and lobby. Education and advocacy is in your hands, when you write content providers and service providers and request that they make content accessible using existing technologies. Lobbying can happen in your hands when you contact your Congressional representatives and request that they support the House’s HR3101 bill (and the Senate version too!).
We plan to take a closer look in the next few weeks at various systems that have (or don’t have) caption technology, making our lives as Mac users more accessible.
May 6, 2010Can’t agree with iTunes movies getting a B – they caption less than 10% of their movie library and I still see none of the New Releases with captions regularly.
That’s a definite fail in my book!
You picked up that their are leader in the technology game and could easily make captions happen in this space (for TV Shows too!) if only they had the desire and commitment to do so!
May 6, 2010@daveynin:
Thanks. My grades are subjective, but generally, An “A” grade in this context would mean everything is captioned, and the captions are high quality. Compare that to “F” which means nothing is accessible caption-wise.
@Michael Lockrey:
The problem with all these entities providing TV/video is that all of them have different roles which are not directly comparable to each other. Hulu and Netflix are more responsible for ensuring captions are available, since they provide the delivery platform for 3rd party content. Apple already has made the mechanism available for caption delivery, and it’s up to the 3rd parties to make use of that mechanism to caption their content.
IMO, Apple is akin to a retail store. Would you blame Target, Walmart, etc for not providing captions on the DVD/BluRay media they sell? Thats why I feel Apple gets a higher grade in this context. In light of the moves they have made regarding the App Store, I believe they can do more to encourage content providers to caption their media, though. We do not know what has happened behind closed doors when Apple and 3rd parties have negotiated to make content available on the iTunes Store – Apple may have already tried to require captioning, and the providers may have threatened to pull out of iTunes entirely. I DO agree with you that the number of captioned movies, and especially having no New Releases captioned, is not acceptable.
May 11, 2010Yes – I think you may be right on the comparison of Apple iTunes to a retail store that sells DVD’s etc.
But it is certainly a very different approach to the one used in the App store for ipad / iphones, etc – where Apple wields much more control in the approval process.
As a secretive company, it is very hard to know who is holding the accessibility back in terms of captioned iTunes content. We all know now that most of the content is captioned originally (i.e. both movies and TV shows) and I have also been told that Apple uses content “polishers” (i.e. people whose job it is to ensure that the product sold is up to the high standards we have come to appreciate and expect at Apple) – so it is very hard to understand why a movie that is released with captions on DVD, can’t make the same “accessible” jump to the iTunes store!
So I guess I am happy with a C rating! Has to be a bare pass mark from me…………
May 13, 2010Thanks for this comprehensive review. I work at a university that has an extensive video collection, much of it independent art house films, any suggestions as to who or how to cc it effectively with out bankrupting us?
May 13, 2010I can get A+ for myself. How? (if you’re asking)
For Windows or Mac, [1] get movies thru uTorrent, [2] get subtitles from to opensubtitles.org, [3] use Avidemux to convert/encode to MP4 with subtitles burned.
Then, I can put MP4 anywhere: iTunes, iPod, iPhone, PS3, XBox, computers, etc.
Good-bye to Netflix, Hulu & YouTube!
May 17, 2010LOL. [DISCLAIMER ALERT] Well, torrents are not exactly legal, especially if the source material is copyrighted. DVD ripping is also an gray legal area. Fair use means you can rip DVD’s you own. DMCA says you can’t reverse engineer the copy protection of DVD’s ;) [/DISCLAIMER ALERT]
Yeah, I did use a similar workflow to add subtitles for a documentary DVD I checked out from the library last week. I used Handbrake (comes in GUI flavors for Mac/Windows, and command line flavors for Mac, Windows, and Linux) to rip the DVD to MP4 and then I used opensubtitles.org to find the subtitles, and then used Subler to add the subtitles, and then put the MP4 in iTunes so I could watch it via my AppleTV. :)
Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to check out avidemux, tho.
To be 100% legal, I could have just used VLC to watch the DVD on my Mac and add in subtitles from an external file. However that meant I couldn’t have watched the DVD on my TV with my wife. I feel this was a fair use exemption due to accessibility issues.
May 17, 2010You might want to look into using subtitling software and adding them to quicktime files of your video collection. There are software packages out there that can add subtitles right onto the video, or as a caption track, etc. Please contact us via our “About” tab at the top of the website, and we can talk more about this topic.
Jun 6, 2010Which program would you be using to extract the subtitles and closed captions on Mac?
Jun 7, 2010I use Handbrake, it will burn in subtitles, or turn captions into soft-subs. I’ve seen other software that will extract the subtitles/cc’s but have to check around. Will get back to you later.
Sorry, comments are closed.
8:18 am
Nice article, I usually use Hulu.com and YouTube.com for captioning. Google rocks.
Where is the grade system with its definitions to clarify? How can you know that you grade the sites?