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High Captioning Costs Cited

FCC Cut Captioning Exemption Request Backlog by Rejecting Long-Standing Ones

Moving to end a backlog of captioning exemption requests built up since 2006, the FCC this year rejected several hundred, about three quarters of the total. That came after requiring many of the broadcast-TV programmers to update their requests. Those that didn’t do so had them rejected, and some of those hired lawyers to refile. That’s according to our review of applications, commission data and interviews with waiver seekers and those opposing them. Efforts by the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau to decide on hundreds of requests led CGB to dismiss 851 without prejudice against refiling in 2012, bureau data show. They show 58 requests first made in 2006, 2005 or earlier and rescinded Oct. 20 to correct procedural flaws in waiver handling during the chairmanship of Kevin Martin were reapplied for (CD Oct 6 p5), and 100 requests predating October 2010 were updated. There are now about 245 requests pending.

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The agency hasn’t approved any waiver since 2006, docket 06-181 (http://xrl.us/bnmikv) and CGB data show. Approval stopped after the Martin FCC granted about 300 applications that year without putting them on public notice, drawing a small, silent protest from people with hearing disabilities at a monthly meeting and concern inside the agency (CD Oct 27/06 p4). Almost all recipients of waivers granted under the staff precedent created in 2006 with approval of Anglers for Christ’s request for Christian Angler Outdoors had to reapply, and 58 did, CGB data show. The bureau dismissed Jan. 18 the 240 non-refiled requests. Another 711 petitioners that made requests before Oct. 8, 2010, had to update them, and on July 5 it dismissed the 611 that were not updated or were withdrawn.

One upshot of the backlog is that hearing-impaired viewers of locally produced religious services and hunting shows on TV stations can’t access captions. Programs need not contain captions while exemption requests are pending. Programmers and representatives of people with hearing problems said the CGB is making diligent efforts to address the remaining requests. “They're trying to clear out the backlog,” said lawyer Blake Reid of Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation. “Now they're sort of in the midst of cleaning up.” The backlog’s “regrettable and delays the provision of closed captioning of those shows,” said lawyer Andrew Phillips of the National Association of the Deaf. NAD thinks “a careful review of each waiver request is warranted to ensure that every show that should be captioned is indeed captioned,” he said. “We are contacted every day by members of our community expressing frustration about programming on TV that is not closed captioned,” including religious and outdoor shows, Phillips said. “We imagine that some of these inaccessible programs have waivers pending."

Advocates and exemption seekers remain far apart on the need to escape rules requiring most programming be captioned. Waiver seekers said they can’t afford to pay at least $150 per half-hour program, or $7,800 a year, plus tape and mailing expenses that they and captioning services estimate it costs. Applicants said they're content to wait for FCC action since they need not caption in the meantime. Van Buren First Assembly of God, which in January updated a 2005 request granted the next year under the Anglers’ precedent and reversed in 2011, doesn’t “particularly care one way or another” about getting a new ruling, said lawyer Anne Crump of Fletcher Heald, representing the Arkansas church. “If they have a ruling, a favorable ruling would be fine, but barring that, silence is better.” Advocates for the deaf and hearing impaired say captioning costs are declining, and entrepreneurial programmers ought to be able to find sponsorship to offset the expenses.

"When there is a will, there is a way,” Executive Director Claude Stout of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc. and Reid, representing TDI and other groups, each said separately. TDI leads a coalition of four other organizations including NAD that’s opposed or sought more financial data on all waiver requests that CGB sought comment on (http://xrl.us/bnmioy). “Any one producer with a good business acumen would seek to find the lowest cost there is to caption its program,” Stout said. “There are hundreds of captioning providers across America, and they can get the services immediately in a remote set-up with a provider from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.” Captions expand a program’s audience to those with problems hearing and “regular citizens” who watch the captions when they are in “bars or spas,” Stout said. The institute is willing to try to connect programmers with captioning services, Reid said. The “economically burdensome” threshold exemption seekers must meet under FCC rules implementing 2010’s 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act considers the cost captions, impact on the programmer, its financial resources and type of operations, said a July order (CD July 23 p22) approved by commissioners (http://xrl.us/bnhkp3).

Those seeking waivers say they can’t afford captioning. Van Buren wants to caption the half-hour weekly Reach Out program with sermons and choir performances broadcast on Nexstar Arkansas stations KARK-TV Little Rock and KFTA-TV Ft. Smith, said Crump. So does Outdoorsmen Productions in Hartington, Neb., said owner Gary Howey. In May the programmer updated a request first made in 2007, and last month got a CGB letter (http://xrl.us/bnmi82) seeking more information for the half-hour Outdoorsmen Adventures show airing weekly on South Dakota stations KTTW Sioux Falls and KTTM Huron and KPTH Sioux City, Iowa, also would like to be captioned, said Gary Howey, owner. The cheapest captioning estimate he received is $8,320 yearly to put subtitles on the 21 original shows Howey produces yearly, plus $840 annually for master copies of tapes, he said. The captioning fees amount to 13 percent of his show’s annual sponsorships, and if he loses his exemption bid “I will close my doors, because I can’t afford it,” Howey said. “But as long as I have the exemption, I still am in business."

Reach Out was quoted $8,684 annually to caption the show, which the church that produces it cut to a half hour from full hour last year because of lack of funds, Crump said. The program lost $36,656.94 in 2011, its filing said (http://xrl.us/bnmiri). There’s a disconnect between the commission’s waiver standards considering a program’s total amount of sales, because all revenue can’t be expended for captions, Crump said. “The commission doesn’t seem to understand, and certainly advocates for the deaf don’t understand, that just because you have X amount of dollars, you can’t use all of it on captioning. There are other expenses to be paid.” Buying captioning equipment to do it in-house would cost $9,000, and Van Buren would have to add an employee to tape the segments and use the software to encode captions, Crump said. “It’s a labor intensive kind of thing.” Computer Prompting and Captioning Co. captioning software typically used for churches and other small institutions costs $4,000 to $6,000, CPCC executives said. They said the $9,000 estimated by Van Buren would be for high-end HD captioning software. It’s “a piece of cake” to use and works with many non-linear editing systems, said CPCC Vice President Sid Hoffman.

Customer demand for captioning been steady in recent years, since in 2006 FCC rules required most English-language, non-news broadcast-TV programming to have the subtitles, said Aberdeen Captioning, CPCC and National Captioning Institute executives. They said those companies accept captioning files online or in electronic files, so master tapes don’t need to be mailed back and forth between programmers and captioners. Aberdeen has “seen an increase” in captioning business, and “we have focused our efforts on digital file delivery,” said President Matthew Cook. “We have built a new division called AberFast and have set up close to 150 stations to accept our file delivery service.” CPCC charges (http://xrl.us/bnmjdx) about $195 per half-hour show, said systems engineer McLean Anderson. “Once we came out with e-captioning, the percentage of people sending their videos to us via UPS or FedEx has dropped precipitously, because the advantages are very simple, you save two days time shipping the tape” and the producer has “better control over the quality,” said Hoffman.

"There’s been a steady demand” for captioning by CPCC, Hoffman said. NCI charges about $350-$400 per hour of programming that’s captioned and encoded to master tapes, said Jay Feinberg, director of marketing services. “Once the captioning requirement was in place, the volume increased” and has been “pretty steady” in recent years, he said. “With the weaker economy, there has been some drop off, some of the smaller producers lost sponsors, and ceased production.”